REVIEW: ‘Death Warrior’ (2009)

Writer, producer, and wannabe action star Hector Echavarria, still fresh from shooting the MMA turkey NEVER SURRENDER, returns with another exploitive, low-budget MMA bomb in the same year and he’s even wearing the exact same clothes! Again, we get a group of pro-MMA fighters in supporting roles, unnecessary soft porn, bland power rock, and shoddy fight work that does neither MMA justice nor action cinema in general.

I grudgingly have to give Echavarria credit. Whatever he’s doing, he keeps getting the funding to produce and star alongside top MMA stars like Keith Jardine, Rampage Jackson and Georges St. Pierre in lousy action flicks that are being distributed by Lionsgate. In addition, he gets to pretend to be a better fighter than all of these guys, surround himself with busty, topless women and have simulated sex with some of them. I’m convinced filmmakers like Uwe Boll and Echavarria have signed deals with the Devil to keep duping otherwise talented people to work with them and keep putting utter trash out on the market. It also takes a lot to make Steven Seagal’s typical DTV productions of the last few years look good in comparison.

DEATH WARRIOR seems to begin right where NEVER SURRENDER ended during an outdoor cage match. As previously mentioned, Echavarria is even wearing the same outfit so I just assumed this was an unnamed sequel but his character name is different and so are the co-stars. What I’m guessing might have happened, given that both films were released on 2009, is that Echavarria shot both of these films back to back. TV series helmer Bill Corcoran is credited as director but this film looks just like Echavarria’s previous movie apart from casting and minor plot changes.

Echavarria is drawn back into another underground, no-rules fighting circuit, this time at the point of a gun when a madman, played with gleeful abandon by veteran actor Nick Mancuso, storms his house with a team of mercenaries. Yawn. They stick his wife (Tanya Clarke) with a slow-acting, lethal bio-toxin to force him to fight in a series of death matches against his “Galaxy” league MMA buddies in hopes of procuring a vaccine. Meanwhile, all of Echavarria’s buddies have been given similar incentives to fight with the ultimate goal of providing a closed-circuit audience of wealthy VIPs with some bloodsport to bet on.

There’s really nothing else to this uninspired movie. Echavarria ends up fighting a number of MMA all-stars in several generic locations with cameras and a bank of computer screens standing in for an audience of extras he presumably couldn’t afford to hire before taking on Jardine in the final match. Meanwhile, he looks for an opportunity to fight back but not before killing a few of his buddies and uncovering corruption in the Galaxy league.

In between bouts, the viewer is treated to gratuitous titty shots, Echavarrria repeatedly having sex with his wife, and a raving Mancuso hamming it up worse than Nick Chinlund in STREET WARRIOR or even Charlton Heston in every movie he’s ever starred in. If there is a Razzie award for over-the-top acting it belongs to Mancuso. He might have been trying to make up for Echavarria who has nothing to offer as an actor or screen fighter.

MMA fans will not find anything resembling quality MMA fighting in this movie. Echavarria is only 40 but looks and moves more like a slightly out of shape 50-year-old when compared with real martial arts screen talents. He has no business pretending to beat up guys like Georges St. Pierre. He fumbles his way through horribly choreographed, framed and edited fights that make even real fighters like Rampage Jackson look bad. I’ve definitely seen worse but the real problem is that the MMA fighting stinks. Echavarria brings a bunch of sloppy and stiff kicking into the “ring.” I shouldn’t even have to bring up REDBELT or FLASH POINT because DEATH WARRIOR isn’t worthy of comparison. You’ll find more sophisticated and believable fight choreography in professional wrestling than you will in this film.

Aside from fighting, the film looks cheap. Echavarria has a lot of “bling” on display including fancy cars, designer t-shirts and expensive homes to shoot in but it doesn’t make any difference. The digital camera used produces poor picture quality, production design is sub-par and most of the women in the film look like prostitutes. There is some very amateur speed-altering edits used in an attempt to make Echavarria look cool and edgy as he walks from his car into a building. The film sounds marginally better thanks to professionally produced, generic rock reminiscent of Nickelback. Regardless of tastes for this sort of sound, its overused. Action scenes, dramatic scenes and sex scenes are all drowning in Nickelback-clone music. In this regard, DEATH WARRIOR might qualify more as a horror film than an actioner, except the only victim is the viewer.

Although slightly more tolerable than NEVER SURRENDER as a result of less soft porn scenes, DEATH WARRIOR is still a laughably poor excuse for a fight flick that tells me Echavarria needs to find a new line of work. However, I see no indication that will happen anytime soon so long as he keeps successfully exploiting the popularity of MMA. He’s doing no one a service, least of all these pro-MMA fighters who are trying to get into action acting. I can only imagine the work that better choreographers and filmmakers will have on their hands in trying to re-train some of these guys who may actually think they’re doing things right when it comes to screen fighting and acting. I’ve seen some of these guys in behind-the-scenes footage praising Echavarria for teaching them the ropes. Echavarria is the last guy they should trying to emulate, seriously. No disrespect to the guy personally because I don’t know him but he’s not an actor or a screen fighter and we now have two films as evidence, sadly with more on the way. If he keeps cranking out these crappy action movies he’s going to end up behind Godfrey Ho in the line-up of worst action filmmakers of all time.

Thankfully, MMA is popular enough that better filmmakers are already giving at least one of these fighters a chance at real stardom. After Echavarria’s forthcoming DUEL OF LEGENDS, Rampage Jackson will hit the big-time by stepping into the role of B.A. Baracus in the big screen treatment of THE A-TEAM. The rest lack Jackson’s charisma and may not be so lucky. Jardine and Rashad Evans will both be appearing in Echavarria’s UNRIVALED while Heath Herring, Anderson Silva and Frank Mir will be joining Echavarria in DEVIL DOGS.