I've seen stinkers like Warrior and the Sorceress, Warlords, Fists of Legend 2, and movies featuring Hulk Hogan, and none of them can rival the sheer lack of talent exhibited by Dragon and the Hawk's writers, actors, (a term I use loosely in the case of this movie) and fight coreographers.
That may sound like a drastic claim, but this is the first movie I've seen where the actors visibly wait for one to finish their lines before they begin their rote delivery of cliche after cliche. There is absolutely no emotion of chemistry displayed by any of the actors. Imagine a movie all shot in one take where the actors simply read their lines off cue cards. That's about the effect Dragon and the Hawk managed throughout the entire production. The forced peformances also manage to gut any humor the movie might have had. To top it off, the plot's terrible, so the storyline can't even shore up the horrible performances by all involved.
When you have a movie about a man who travels to America to look for his missing sister, you don't expect him to just travel aimlessly around showing his sister's picture to anyone he meets, but Dragon Pak does. The "Hawk", the police officer that eventually gets around to helping Pak in his plight spends most of her time whining about people touching her car. Gripping.
I picked up the movie partially due to word of mouth, and an old Rocky Mountain News article since it mentioned that the star was a Tae Kwon Do master, and after seeing some amazing performances by TKD pratitioners in The Legend of Drunken Master, Who Am I?, and even in Kiss of the Dragon, I was looking forward to see a movie centered around the art. Dragon and the Hawk failed to deliver anything to the level of the aforementioned films. Instead, there's little more than a series of confused and sloppy fight sequences where every kung fu movie cliche is wheeled out with all the aplomb of a police training video. Dragon Pak fends off one fighter at a time, even when he's surrounded on all sides. Finishing moves typically involve Dragon tripping someone then punching them in the face while they're down. While the others involved in the fight mill around in the background. The fights are ugly, uninspired, and worst of all, they're boring. Not a good thing when it's supposed to be a kung-fu movie.
The only real highlight is watching the lead bad guy try to act. He grimaces, and googles his eyes at the camera as if it's supposed to impart some kind of meaning to his flat monotone. He looks like he has some strange medical condition, which resulted in everyone who watched the movie with me breaking into laughter every time he appeared onscreen.
