The story is basically this: Eric Hawke (a British Marine) attends the funeral of his policeman brother who he discovers has been attempting to investigate the mysterious kidnappings and murders of a local Asian street gang. The clues seem to point to a rival neo-Nazi white supremacist gang as the culprits, but Lizzie (Hawke's brother's partner in the police force) is not so sure: she suspects a larger conspiracy which involves one of the city's most powerful crime bosses, a man by the name of Garr. As the body count rises, Eric, Lizzie and young Asian gang member Lipo Chung race to uncover the truth behind the murders, before more missing gang members wash up on the beach with missing organs...
While _Hawk's Vengeance_ is not by far the worst movie I have ever seen, it does rank as one of the more generic and cliched budget action films I have seen. Its hackneyed script, banal dialogue and ridiculous plot cannot even begin to justify the production costs for this movie.
Nevertheless, it is not without its saving graces: Gary Daniels, despite his 'Dick Van Dyke' "British" accent (he sounded more Aussie to me), is an appealing actor, with the makings of a charismatic action star whose (sadly) badly-written dialogue and poorly constructed character "development" relegate him to the status of a one-dimensional martial arts stick figure. Although some of the fight choreography (not to mention filming and editing) were laughably amateurish (there were some kicks and punches which obviously did not connect with their opponents), Daniels still comes across as an impressive martial arts hero. The only one more impressive than Daniels in terms of stage combat is the main villain Garr (played by Cass Magda), who unfortunately is killed off in a rather anticlimactic fight near the end of the movie, without a sufficiently mind-blowing tete-a-tete knock-down-drag-out martial arts fight ever occurring between Garr and Eric Hawke.
The only truly interesting actor in this movie would have to be Jayne Heitmeyer (Earth: Final Conflict), who convincingly portrays your typical Hollywood female cop with beauty, brains and brawn in equal proportions. I was happy to see that although she had few fight scenes in the film, the ones she did have were not ones where she had to resort to hitting people from behind with props or having cat fights with a female villain, but actual stage-fighting. There is, of course, a typically gratuitous love scene between Hawke and Lizzie, which may be one of the only reasons you might even consider watching this movie.
The story is convoluted, full of ridiculously unbelievable red herrings, unconvincing villains (neither the Asian gang members nor the neo-Nazi skinheads look remotely frightening, and are often unintentionally amusing despite their murderous ways and their semi-automatic weapons), stereotypical characters and plot holes galore. There are attempts at moments of levity, including a couple of 'Rosencrantz' and 'Guildenstern'-type characters in the form of two incompetent hitmen working for Garr, but aside from a few poorly executed jokes about Asian racial stereotypes (in banter between Hawke and Lipo) and female gender stereotypes (between Hawke and Lizzie), there is very little to laugh about, except for the aforementioned unintentionally amusing scenes.
As I said, it's not the worst movie I have ever scene, but halfway through the movie I had already guessed that this movie was a Canadian production, and I was disappointed that I was proven correct. Once again, yet another movie that gives Canadian film-making a bad name. I give it two out of five stars, and that's pushing it.
