Gedo (2000 Video) User Reviews

By-The-Numbers, Run-Of-The-Mill, Par-For-The-Course..

[anxietyresister · 4/10 · 11 November 2009]

Yippee, it's another cheapo action flick. Must be time for another of my 'hilarious' lists. Here we go..

1. All punches, kicks, explosions etc must be repeated at least twice in slow motion from different angles. The makers obviously this is cool when in actual fact, it is incredibly daft.

2. The main character must be a Maverick Pretty Boy (MPB) cop who goes outside procedure and gets the job done despite the constant threats from his superior of taking his badge away if he doesn't tow the line. MPB has an odd accent.. Australian? South Afrrican? Who cares?

3. MPB's buddy will last for around half an hour in which time they will have a handful of cringeworthy 'bonding' moments, before he is blown away leaving MPB to weep over his dead body and VOW REVENGE.

4. MPB's squeeze is played by an actress who must have the most thankless role ever. She's in about 5 scenes, in which she has nothing to do but moan that MPB won't meet her parents and is taking too many risks on the job. Not to worry, they make up by the end and she gets her tits rubbed in a sex scene with soft lighting and evocative musak. HURRAY!!

5. There is a gang of Russians who do nothing but drink vodka and party with Playmates all day long in a downtown club they own. They all seemingly have moustaches and pony tails, but their primary purpose is to provide fodder for MPB to practise his kung fu on. HII-YAA!!

6. The 'evil' guy in the film isn't such an bad egg after all, he is an honourable Japanese Yakuza warrior who only kills the target he is assigned to. MPB eventually realises this, and the two team up against THE REAL THREAT towards the end, a guy who has the most disturbing smile I've seen since Tony Blair shuffled his way out of 10 Downing St.

7. There are more cars in this film shot at then any I have ever seen. The strange thing is, the bullets don't even scratch the windshield, even when the firer is shooting at close range. This leads to believe either no one in the movie can aim for toffee, or the vehicles are painted with a miracle gloss which renders them bulletproof. Hmm..

8. A personal observation: when I first looked this up after watching it, I could not believe my eyes when I found out it was made in 2001. For all the world, it resembles a 1980's picture. The only clue otherwise is the very modern mobile phones used by everyone. Back then, they'd have been talking into bricks, y'see.

9. The name 'Fatal Blade' is stupid. That's why I haven't referred to it in the review, and this will be my last mention of those two words. Thank you.

10. Okay, finally some positivity.. There is an Asian chick who acts as a love interest for the Yakuza guy, and she is great in the part. She even handles some of the ridiculous dialogue with aplomb, and is absolutely stunning in a red dress. Sadly, she meets a rather bloody end, but her presence alone is enough to save the film from the scrapheap.

I can still only give it 4/10 though. Ideal as an aftertaste to a night at the pub, or an excuse to put off having relations with your missus. Now showing on Movies 4 Men. Classy..

Gary Daniels is back and better than ever in Fatal Blade.

[foose88 · 16 August 2002]

Fatal Blade has some of the best fights, Than Most of the other Gary Daniels films I've Seen Besides (Black Friday, and Bloodmoon). I like the idea of Making a little war to where east meets west, With china and the local crime lords of L.A., and having The LAPD put right in the middle. This is not the best Daniels film. However any Gary Daniels film that has been made, is alot better than any s*** that you see on the big sceen. This means that people should start putting his movies on the big sceen, and not wasting time with Action Stars who don't show what action is about.

Alert! Very bad movie!

[andropov_br · 3/10 · 16 December 2002]

Lord! I can´t believe that a movie like this could be done. It´s very bad, the story is a bulls***, the actions scenes aren´t good either. In the beginning it semmed to be interesting, but lately I could see it was one of the worst movies ever made! Keep your distance from this s***.

Poor even for its kind

[netzwelter · 2/10 · 13 November 2005]

This movie is poor. Especially the action scenes are very badly performed. The martial arts is one of the worst in recent years: People behave like puppets and as seen in many low budget movies, enemies seem to stand in a queue: only one is attacking the "hero" at once. Talking of the "hero": One of the cops (Gary Daniels) is supposed be the protagonist in this movie. But he such a lamer without any style. I really hated him and really wanted HIM to get killed.

Also, I wonder why this film is rated 18+. There is almost no real explicit violence in this movie. No head shots, no dust of blood from bullet hits, nothing at all. Bullets don't even punch holes into cars. Only the later scene in the grill meets today's standards.

The only reason for an 18+ rating might be the fact that the cop's (imho) ugly wife's breasts are visible in one totally displaced sex scene, which summits a totally lame and boring side story of the cop's private life.

The swordsman himslelf is however great. It's also a nice idea to have the Yakuza guys talking in Japanese (with subtitles)

This Blade should have been sharpened to a finer point.

[tarbosh22000 · 3/10 · 4 July 2016]

LAPD cop Richard Fox (Daniels) finds himself caught in the middle of a Yakuza war as he tries to get to the truth about the death of his partner. While crime boss Bronson (Rivers) is able to run wild with his drug business because he has some dirty cops on the take, Japanese swordmaster Domoto (Nakajo) comes to town for his own reasons. At a certain point, those reasons intersect with Fox's, and the two men from different worlds suddenly find they have more in common than they originally thought. Caught in the middle of all this are the women - Saemi (Matsuda) and Fox's wife Linda (Messuri). Will Fox come out victorious - or will he end up on the wrong end of Domoto's FATAL BLADE? Fatal Blade is trying to be like a PM movie. This isn't a criticism, necessarily; we wish more productions would at least try to hit the heights of the Gary Daniels three R's of awesome: Rage (1995), Riot (1996), and Recoil (1998). The only problem is, PM doesn't do "FM" - fast motion - and this movie does. So while it tries to do some car chases/car blow-ups in classic PM fashion, it commits the no-no of speeding up what fight scenes there are. You don't NEED to speed up Gary Daniels. This was really annoying. There should have been more un-sped-up Martial Arts fights and less gun-shooting. Daniels even disappears for decent chunks of the running time. But when he is on screen, he has classic 90's hair which we all love and enjoy.

While the movie is competently made, it doesn't really reach the heights of other "East meets West" actioners like Red Sun Rising (1994), Sword of Honor (1996), American Dragons (1998), and especially all-time classic Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991). That's because this came out in 2000, a death-time for DTV product. It even brings to mind the dud Double Deception (2001) at times. Things were just better earlier on in our nation's history. Sure, it has a classic "Final Warehouse Fight", some casual racism, a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, and a guy screaming his head off as he shoots a machine gun, but we were somehow hoping for something that tied it all together a bit more.

We do give the movie credit for the good amount of scenes that are spoken in Japanese and have subtitles. This showed to us that they were serious and it helped things along. However, most of the English dialogue consists of people shouting "what am I paying you for!??!" The Gary Daniels revenge plot should have been streamlined and more hardcore. Just a few years on from The Quest (1996), we have a very different-looking Jack McGee doing not very much and not being used properly...and is that Cuba Gooding SENIOR in a nothing role as a pawn shop owner? Not that we're not happy to see him, but...WHY? It also should be mentioned that a common phenomena in low-budget DTV product happens here: smaller-time actors are hired that look/behave like other actors (or should have BEEN other actors). For example, the guy that played Bronson also could have been Robert Patrick, Judd Nelson, Dean Cain, Frank Stallone, or Charlie Sheen during his "Charles Sheen" period. And the guy that played Mitchell, the police Lieutenant, could have been James Russo, Ed Lauter, or...or maybe we just watch way too many movies. But we're clearly addicted and can't get enough - and we do it all for YOU, our lovely readers. We live to inform you about movies like Fatal Blade. If that's a crime, then call Richard Fox and have us arrested. (See, the fact that we think Richard Fox is a real person pretty well proves our initial point).

Gary Daniels is credited as Associate Producer, as is frequent Daniels collaborator George Cheung, and it features the West Coast gangsta rap track "187" by a rapper known as G-Sleep. Despite all this, Fatal Blade really should have been better. To be fair, there are some threads of the movie that stand out, but it was lacking in other areas. This Blade should have been sharpened to a finer point.

Kiyoshi Nakajo's film

[winner55 · 7/10 · 12 August 2007]

Aussie fight performer Gary Daniels has long lived with some form of mental illness that convinced him he could act. Every time I see one of his films (usually by accident, one of those rental-store boxes with only the title on it), I think to myself, "gosh, this guy couldn't have made any movies before, he's such an amateur." But unfortunately, he's made quite a few, and hasn't learned a dam' thing working in any of them.

This is his best film, exactly because he plays a character somewhat peripheral to the real protagonist, a Japanese hit-man out to clean up a renegade band of Yakusa operating in the US. He's played by Kiyoshi Nakajo who, surprisingly, almost never made a movie before. His performance is superb; precisely, his performance IS the film.

I ask all Gary-Daniels-haters to set aside their (entirely justified) animosity for the Aussie wannabe, long enough to watch the performance by Kiyoshi Nakajo. He makes his character believable, which adds credibility to a sometimes silly - but sometimes surprisingly suspenseful - crime story.

Not only have I enjoyed the movie on that basis alone, but now two or three times. Not a classic, but not your typical Gary Daniels disaster either. Definitely Kiyoshi Nakajo's film - and he earns it.

UNDERRATED AND WORTH WATCHING

[rettercritical · 8/10 · 12 February 2022]

Gary Daniels has one of the best DTV martial arts movie careers and I think this is one of the highlights ... A half-American and half-Japanese production, shot in a combination of both Japanese and English.

All the action scenes are terrific, Daniels gets to do what he does best but we get the extra element of swordplay. Kiyoshi Nakajoe kind of steals the show with his performance, a super-cool Yakuza character who seems to control the space around him. What I liked about the film was how the dueling narratives of both men intertwined... Cop and criminal that may have more in common than they realise.

I have no idea why this film has bad reviews on IMDB, I think its well worth tracking down and watching if this is your genre. Its very much an above average DTV martial arts film in terms of craft (the often pastel colours give a nice aesthetic feeling) and the action is mostly superb. Would be a good double-feature with White Tiger or one of Gary's PM entertainment flicks.

I've Seen FAR Worse!

[Lexuses71 · 3 May 2003]

This film falls into the Action Channel late night "guilty Pleasure" zone.

It's derivative in many ways, but I agree with another reviewer here that what made it sort of interesting is that more than half of it was subtitled in Japanese.

What separated it from the norm a little was the impressive screen presence of Kiyoshi Nakajo, as a mysterious Yakuza swordsman, who helps a woman find her sister's killer (played in a nasty but quasi-comical manner by Victor Rivers, the smarmy guy with the thin moustache who was part of Eddie Murphy's con artist posse in "The Distinguished Gentleman"). There's also Martial Artist Gary Daniels, not the best actor around (I sort of lump him into the Daniel Bernhardt category) but has great fight moves. I agree the fight sound was muted for my tastes. I had never heard of or seen Kiyoshi Nakajo prior to this film. He is apparently very popular in Japan. He sort of emanates that conflicted "brooding" Chow Yun Fat thingie (think "The Replacement Killers") which says a lot because his dialogue was all in Japanese. But I found him very intriguing to watch. Think of a Japanese Lee Van Cleef. Stern, quiet, face says it all. Senses his LA Yakuza brother is up to no good.

Kiyoshi is a bit older than the rest of the actors, one who has left a lot of dead bodies in his wake, especially with that sword. You just don't play around with this guy.

Other than Daniel's avenging cop, Kiyoshi and two others, it's hard to tell who is who.

Just get some Kettle Korn, check it out for the fight sequences, don't try to figure it all out. It has a certain style. There's far worse stuff out there than this.

The fights were good

[JackDevoe · 5 March 2003]

Everyone says this movie is awful. They rightfully say so. Gary Daniel's previous movies do range from terrible to good cheesy fun. (The fight scenes are the best thing about his "good" films.) I knew this movie wasn't gonna be that great, but I never thought it would actually have a worse script than BLOODMOON and COLD HARVEST. (These two are his best films because of their excelent fight coordination.) The film makers didn't even know what was going on. It's like the whole cast and crew was wandering around not knowing what to do in this film. However, the action is great. Akihiro Noguchi of COLD HARVEST returns to direct the fight scenes, and even has help from Koichi Sakamoto of DRIVE. If there was more action though, and if it was longer, (It's not painfully short.) that would have been better. The scenes just seemed too short for their own good. (Similar to the problem in the FATAL FURY anime series which had awesome but short fight scenes) Gary Daniels even gets to exchange a few blows with veteran stuntman James Lew. But after those few kicks and punches, he's down like a sack of potatoes. Even George Cheung was once again wasted. (He's a great martial artist, but his skills are BARELY used in the MARTIAL ARTS films he's in. What exactly is up with that.) THe sound effects weren't the best either. Punches and kicks seemed too quiet. (And I don't think they were going for the same effect like in CROUCHING TIGER) But whoever this Kiyoshi Nakajo is, who makes his US debut as Domoto, he rocks. He has an awesome screen presense, and handles a sword masterfully. He was the best actor in this whole film, and made it worth watching even more. Another intersting aspect of this film is that A great portion of it is in Japanese too. THat was a very good idea to have a film in English and Japanese, as it gave a good mix. The Japanese scenes were better acted than the English ones. I suggest renting this movie on one dollar day when you have nothing better to do, and just skip to the action scenes. I personally can't get enough of martial arts action, and weather the movie is good or not, as long as it features good fight choreography, it's worth watching.

What have I done to deserve this..?

[plaznihqyllnikaaf · 1 April 2002]

Ok... I know it's with Gary Daniels, but I didn't know it would be THAT bad. It's basically a traditional east-meet-west yakuza crime action stinker set in the US. Sounds interesting? It's not. Gary Daniels "performance" is actually the best about this crap (and I hate him). Lame plotting, dull action and bad acting. Stay away!!!!