Last to Surrender

Of the three DTV "Rowdy" Roddy Piper flicks I've watched over the past week or so (this, Jungleground and No Contest), this is by far the worst. All three were very conventional action flicks. This one is a very predictable cop buddy story, very similar to, say, Ridley Scott's Black Rain. Piper plays an American cop whose beat is Chinatown. His partner is killed by a Chinese gangster (Andy Yim), who then runs off to Burma. Piper is paired with a Chinese cop, Ong Soo Han, who is also after him and the two go to Burma to find him. The thing that makes this film so bad is that Piper is super racist. It's no fun watching an actor you like be a dick for most of the movie. Sure, his character arc has him become less racist over the course of the movie, and, of course, he goes from not wanting to be partnered with Han to liking him. But it's more like Piper goes from making mean racist jokes to more kind-hearted racist jokes. The film is pretty racist itself, with a lot of terrible jokes about Asians eating gross stuff and having characters do very silly looking martial arts. One character's name is Bong Bong and Piper keeps referring to him as Ding Dong ("No cawr me Ding Dong, assho!" he will exclaim). It gets better as it goes along and some of the action sequences near the end are decent, but it's generally pretty bad.