THE MOVIE
We begin at a karate tournament, which is headlined by a battle between a team from New Jersey and a team from Los Angeles; each team has put up $200,000 and the winner gets all the money. The team's coaches are introduced and the Los Angeles coach is my main man Jim Kelly!
His buddy Ralph (Richard Roundtree - SHAFT) comes over, and they think something fishy is going on, because the Los Angeles team are losing fights. It couldn't be that they suck... Chuck (Jim Kelly) heads backstage and discovers the New Jersey team has been loading their gloves with metal, because "the local business owners" (translation: the mob) behind their side of the money refuse to lose. Chuck is spotted by some of their henchmen, so he gives them a good whooping, but then when he's trying to get in his car they shoot him. Boo!
After the Los Angeles team are somehow victorious, it quickly becomes clear Ralph and Chuck aren't going to be getting their money. I mean, they showed absolutely zero patience and chased after it only about 10 minutes after the tournament ended, but these New Jersey crooks were definitely not going to pay.
Chuck turns up with a bullet wound, so his girlfriend, Teri, and Ralph sneak him out of town to try and get him healed up. Chuck tells Teri to call a couple of friends to come in and help with the situation. Which is lucky, because the next morning, all these bad white dudes find them, beat Ralph with a post, rape Teri, and shoot Chuck some more. That's a bad start to any day!
Chuck's friends arrive - it's Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. So you know shit is about to go down!
Their first order of business is to get their money, which involves Jim Brown shaking down a bank manager and then wiping out some mob boss and his goons.
Fred Williamson bags him a white girl and... I think that was all he was doing. They manage to find Chuck and Ralph, who were being cared for by some other decent black folk, but Teri has been kidnapped by the main bad guys. So they set about saving her and putting an end to the bad guys' operation once and for all. Which means lots of shooting and explosions and these three tough men just being tough.
Their first order of business is to get their money, which involves Jim Brown shaking down a bank manager and then wiping out some mob boss and his goons.
Fred Williamson bags him a white girl and... I think that was all he was doing. They manage to find Chuck and Ralph, who were being cared for by some other decent black folk, but Teri has been kidnapped by the main bad guys. So they set about saving her and putting an end to the bad guys' operation once and for all. Which means lots of shooting and explosions and these three tough men just being tough.
REACTION
This is a relatively fun blaxploitation action film, made all the better because of having the four baddest dudes on the planet working together. And they all just deliver hilariously badass dialogue and threats with effortless cool. Odd to me that they were constantly giving the sheriff loads of shit, even though he didn't arrest them for, you know, walking around town with big guns and shooting a whole bunch of people and blowing up cars. But really, this type of movie is just your stereotypical blaxploitation-type of thing; short on story, but heavy on the action and the cool. And I'm here for it.
JIM KELLY
He whooped some dudes, but my man had a pretty bad spell in this movie; he got shot, his woman was violated, and he spent the majority of the movie in bed trying to recover. I don't think I saw a tennis racquet at any point.. And his karate students looked like shit! No wonder he topped making movies after this (and this was already after a few years off).
I'd like to see some boutique label do a blu-ray of this movie, because the only way to view it right now is on the youtube. Which you should do. It's free and it's the right thing to do.
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