Karate Girl (2011)

The worst part about being a Rina Takeda fan is that you will never find a movie properly showcasing her abilities, because nobody ever made one (and, by now, probably never will).She's awesome. Very talented, and a great screen presence, which are the most important traits of an action star. But she just doesn't have any writers/directors/producers caring to capitalize on that. High Kick Girl was a nice if deeply flawed first effort. Fans were hoping Karate Girl would be the one to get it right, but it ended up being a huge step backward, as too were her subsequent films, but let's stay focused.What is wrong with KG? Problem #1: not enough Rina! We want to see Rina taking up as much of her film as Jackie Chan takes up of his films. This was a noticeable problem in High Kick and even worse in KG.Problem #2 is what KG fills the holes with: a lot of plot. Plot isn't inherently bad, but it is when it's so repetitive and boring. I don't know how many times I can listen to the bad guys have the same conversation. I don't know why they want me to try.Problem #3 is her co-star, the fourteen-year-old Tatsuya Naka. For a fourteen-year-old, she's extremely talented. She has some remarkable acrobatic moves. But the issue is she reads as having impressive agility, not impressive force, and the movie asks us to believe in her force. We watch her incapacitate a room full of large, muscular adults by lightly kicking each of them once, and it just doesn't work. She should be in the movie, just not in this way, and not for this much screen time. The film treats her with the same importance as the person used to market the film, both on the cover and in the title!A lot of martial arts films are enjoyable with fast forwarding (for example, High Kick Girl). KG is disappointing even then. It has a couple of good moments, and Rina does the best one could hope for with this material, but the final product simply isn't a good one, unfortunately.If I had reviewed this when I first saw it in 2011, I'd end with "I can't wait for her third film-maybe they'll get it right next time!" But since I'm writing this after my 2018 rewatch, we already know how that one turned out.

I enjoyed this film. It was full of action, entertaining and all this from two pretty damn hot chicks. Yeah. And unlike that girl from Star Wars (the new remake one) this girl is pretty and kicks butt... Enjoyed the action until the inevitable end.

When very young, Ayaka's karate instructor father was killed and her sister kidnapped.As an adult, Ayaka determines to find out what happened. She has her father's black belt, and the bad folks in the film want to take it in some ritualized way. Ayaka decides to fight back.Will Ayaka survive all the hostile attention? Will the two sisters reunite? Will the director get a better adviser about fight sequences? ------Scores-------Cinematography: 10/10 Excellent, beautiful, professional.Sound: 10/10 Excellent.Acting: 2/10 Rina Takeda was one of the centres of the film, and her performance was not believable: too light, too small, too thin, too unprepared, too little trained, too slow, too inaccurate. Takeda's opponents were too passive and often unmoving; they seldom press their advantage when a decisive blow was available. This sort of PC nonsense is completely the opposite of convincing. The fist, barely moving, of a 100 pound woman stops and repels the flying kick of a 180 pound man? Never has happened, never will happen--outside of a film where the director holds the viewer in utter contempt.Screenplay: 0/10 Should have been billed as fantasy. There is enough material for a 15 minute short; 91 minutes is way too long, especially when the filler consists of insultingly bogus fight sequences.

Having just seen "High Kick Girl", it was with a certain amount of dread of expectation of disappointment that I sat down to watch "Karate Girl" (or "K.G."). However, those disappointments and fears were quickly swept away, as this movie was a rather nice step up compared to the other movie - both story-wise, production-wise and entertainment-wise.The story in "Karate Girl" was rather enjoyable and had quite more depth to it, than what was seen in "High Kick Girl". The story is helped along nicely but more well-choreographed martial arts and better acting. The story told in this movie is about a legendary martial arts master whose belt is coveted by some 'bad guy'. He invades a dojo and kills the martial arts master here in order to obtain it, as well as killing one of his two daughters, while kidnapping the second to raise and turn into a killing weapon. Having survived the ordeal, Ayaka (Rina Takeda) grows up carrying around her family secret, and comes face to face, literally, with her past.And one of the best things about the movie was the fact that they had moved away from having to show the same scene two times over, in either slow motion or in a slightly different angle. Sure, it does still happen every once in awhile here in this movie, but not like "High Kick Girl".If you have seen "High Kick Girl", I strongly suggest you forget all about it and move on to watch "Karate Girl", as it is better in every single aspect, despite having a fair amount of faces appear from "High Kick Girl" in this movie as well."Karate Girl" is actually good entertaining, though not amongst the highest ranking martial arts movies, but still, it delivered and entertained.