Jean Claude Van Damme broke through as a martial arts star in "Bloodsport" (1988). His successful follow-up film was "Kickboxer" (1989), which spawned a franchise that is now on its seventh film. The original series lasted until "Redemption: Kickboxer 5" (1995). Van Damme played lead character Kurt Sloane in the first and the fourth installment.

When the series was rebooted last 2016 with "Kickboxer: Vengeance," black-belter martial artist and stuntman Alain Moussi took over the role of Sloane, with Van Damme playing his elderly trainer Master Durand. This present film "Kickboxer: Retaliation" is a sequel that picked up about a year and a half after the events of the previous film.

Sloane was kidnapped and incarcerated in Thailand by Thomas Tang Moore, a promoter of illegal fight tournaments. Moore wanted him to fight the gigantic bioengineered champion Mongkut for a purse of $1 million. Kurt refused to fight, so Moore had Kurt's wife Liu (Sara Malakul) kidnapped as well to force him to fight. Kurt did not have a choice.

The skeletal plot is just a flimsy excuse to showcase scene after scene of fighting in different martial arts styles, most of them had the bone-crunching violence fans of fight films look for.

Watch more in iWantv or TFC.tv

The acting of all the actors, even the leads and the veterans, were either hammy or wretched. The cinematography and effects used in certain fight scenes looked cheap and bad, especially that one set on the roof of a speeding train when the fighters had to fall off, or that hall of mirrors scene with the two bikini-clad lady fighters with tattoos that glowed in the dark.

One big drawback here was that, unlike the charismatic Van Damme, the current lead actor Alain Moussi was not exactly a graceful-looking fighter on the big screen. His moves (except maybe his kick and flip jumps in the final fight) looked awkward and tentative, so that it was not convincing even when he had the upper hand in his matches.

His opponents, which include Mike Tyson (as scrapper Briggs) and Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (as man-mountain Mongkut), looked more formidable in their fights. Dour and humorless, Moussi does not exactly make you want to root for him.

If the names of '80s stars Jean Claude Van Damme and Christopher Lambert drew you in to watch the film, you'd be disappointed because they had very little screen time. The character of Van Damme was even blinded here, so he did not have a fight scene of significant length at all.

The 60-year old Lambert, meanwhile, played Moore and perhaps to remind us of his biggest role as Connor McLeod in "Highlander" (1986), he had a brief sword fight scene with Van Damme.

Despite these bad points, we should recognize that this film was only made for fight fans to whet their adrenaline rush, and nothing much more. For that, it was not a total loss. But honestly, those fights could have been choreographed and executed better. 3/10

This review was originally published in the author's blog, "Fred Said."