#Kickboxer2, #Kickboxer3, & #Kickboxer4 (1991, 1992, 1994)

Following Kurt Sloan's (Van Damme) victory over the villainous Tong Po in the first movie, Tong Po kills Kurt between movies, forcing the third brother David to take his place in a quest for revenge.

David is a chill dude in LA who trains people his own gym. He even mentors some asshole kid who you want to punch in the face for acting tough all the time. People try to coerce him into fighting again, which he's mostly indifferent to at this point. But when Tong Po forces his hand and does the world a favor by killing the kid, David seeks revenge and does what a kickboxer does best.

It's a decent film despite the dumbass act of demeaning the outcome of the first film, but what are you gonna do? It was the 90s when shitty DTV-esque sequels ran rampant. Sasha Mitchell didn't strike me as a great fighter, but I grew to accept it after a while and had fun with the movie. It didn't hurt that Xian Chow (Dennis Chan) came back to mentor him, reminiscent of that Miyagi type figure that makes this into one of those Karate Kid / Rocky type stories.

When the third movie rolls around, we throw a lot of that out the window and have David and Xian head to Brazil and get caught up in a child slavery sex trafficking ring. They make friends with another asshole kid and have to save his sister from a bunch of rich pedos who force him to fight. This escalates into some forced super training that doesn't seem to make David break a sweat, because he's pretty much superhuman at this point. He turns into a terminator and stops using his feet and starts using guns after a while, but it's still pretty entertaining.

When part 4 happens, things start to go a bit downhill. Sasha is back as David Sloan, but he's the only one. Tong Po is recast by a guy with prosthetics to make him appear more Asian, a bald cap that's all too obvious in certain scenes, and an evident stunt double. David start off in jail, having been framed by Tong Po, until he's let out under an alias to infiltrate Tong's Mexico fight ring to rescue his kidnapped wife.

If Tong finds out Jack Jones is actually David Sloan, he's a dead man. Yet hilariously enough, henchman Thom Mathews introduces him in a fight as "Sloan", but the filmmakers conveniently forgot about the secret identity part and Tong Po never seemed to notice. Probably because he can't see so well with those prosthetics covering half his eyes.

There's also a 5 foot girl with juicy melons that's supposed to be depicted as a good fighter, but that's just laughable. In the end, Tong Po gets away, never to return as this era of Kickboxer sequels ends abruptly.

I feel like I'm getting afflicted with the Tromafreak syndrome in saying, "These movies are great! 6/10!"