The plot is a serviceable, throwaway number. Pretty boy, wannabe martial artist Kit wants to be a martial arts master. The only moves he knows are ones he imitates from classic kung fu VCDs. He goes into Jo's figurine store to check out a Bruce Lee statue and aides her when some hooligans accost her. The two make cute and she introduces him to her father, a Gracie Ju-Jitsu expert, who reluctantly takes on Kit as his pupil.

Kit needs all the help he can get because he further pisses off the thugs when he claims they rigged an underground bar fight involving Lung, a turncoat former pupil of the master. It turns out, Lung's boys Kerrigan'd the master before a martial arts tournament called "The Ultimate Fight" (someone get the UFC lawyers on the phone), and now the master wants to train Kit to get revenge.

Kit cannot even get in one day of training before he's visited by the lead pipe beatdown brigade. The standard martial film template is followed, training montages, more attacks by the goons, Kit slowly gets better, makes goo-goo eyes at Jo, the baddies get more peeved, until finally the big finale at the Ultimate Fight comes along.

Usually, I'd be all over a style-versus-style martial arts film, but this is such a c-grade movie, it really fails to deliver. Action fans would be better off revisiting a Bloodsport or Master of the Flying Guillotine. A few of the Ultimate Fight fighters are a big wrestler guy, a Tae Kwon Do guy, a Jeet Kun Do guy, a Korean chick with a hair lip, and the mystery bad guy who's shown doing Ivan Drago workouts with electrodes while muscling around big steel pillars. His technique is King Kong style. Sounds cool, but it just consists of him bearhugging people to death. He wears a latex fetish outfit when he fights, which seems fitting because the master says, "His weakness is his penis."

The plot is garbage, not that you really need a great plot in a martial film. It helps, but it is also the kind of genre that can forsake deep scripting and be carried by interesting characters or decent action. The lead actor is a third rate pop idol looking kid. The tone and performances veer from rote drama to slapstick. The film will turn on a dime, the bad guys being all funny and goofy one second, then trying to firebomb murder the heroes in the next breath. The action is all blurry combat, quick cutting, and sped up. The choreography is unremarkable and the different styled fighters dont show much pizazz or distinction. Those just slightly knowledgeable in Ju-Jitsu will get a laugh at how totally wrong the few moves are when applied. Its like the choreographer heard a third hand story about Ju-Jitsu and imagines what a rear naked choke must look like.

The DVD: Tai Seng.

Picture: Non-Anamorphic Widescreen. A really low end transfer. It is just across the board weak both technically and printwise. The colors are unsubstantial with sickly fleshtones. Especially the young leads, all look pale or gray-faced. It's compressed and badly defined. Not friendly for high end or basic systems. I'll assume much of this has to do with the film being a low budget number that probably went to the video/Asian black-market isles pretty quickly.

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 or 2.0 Cantonese or 2.0 Mandarin tracks. English and Chinese (simplified and traditional) subtitles. Being a pretty low budget number, the sound fx sound largely stock and hollow. There are some moments when the dialogue recording wasn't that great and post-dubbed tracks appear to be largely out of synch.

Extras: Nothin'.

Conclusion: Pretty forgettable, cheap, mostly flat HK film. Its likely to merit some interest to those that devour all things HK action (I count myself in that group), especially of the so-bad-its-good variety. Being a mediocre film with a lackluster transfer, I cannot imagine suggesting it as anything other than a rental. I've was on the fence about rating it as a rental or a skip it.