Only the Strong

FXM has been running a bunch of stuff that I've mostly blogged about already, although to be fair to them it's not as if Fox has as big a library as TCM does with the whole former Turner library, never mind their bigger budget allowing to get more other stuff. There is one film in the current rotation that I hadn't blogged about before, a 1993 film called Only the Strong. It's getting another airing tomorrow, January 24, at 3:10 AM, so I finally watched it to do a post on here.

The movie opens up with an introductory scene in Brazil. Louis Stevens (played by martial artist-turned actor Mark Dacascos) is a member of the US Army assigned to Brazil to help in what I'm guessing was fighting the War on Drugs. But he seems to have taken to the local culture. He's watching a couple of locals practice capoeira, a martial art that looks a bit like dancing, at least when they're just practicing, in that it has a lot of balletic kicks and flips. Frankly, this seems like it would be suboptimal for real life, but that's beside the point. Stevens likes capoeira so much he strips down to his undershirt and joins in, until a jeep with some superiors shows up and tells him he's getting shipped back to the States.

Now out of the army, Stevens goes back to his home town of Miami, specifically Lincoln High where he attended. It's turned into your stereotypically Hollywood view of an inner-city high school, with violence, drugs, and a totally trashed appearance. There's even drug dealing going on in the courtyard. Stevens, having had enough, uses his capoeira moves on one of the dealers, winning the respect of the other students there. More surprisingly, he's approached by some of the other teachers, who say that this the first time in years that the students have actually paid attention to any of the adults.

With that in mind, they come up with a ridiculous idea: take a dirty dozen of the school's most incorrigible students and teach them capoeira. Somehow, this will completely transform the school. One of the teachers helps Stevens gain possession of a disused firehouse and convert it both into a place where he can live, as well as training those dozen boys in the art of capoeira. It goes about as well as you can expect at first, which is to say it's going to take Stevens kicking the snot out of one of the students for them to start respecting them. And yet, somehow, it seems to start working.

Except, there's a catch, in that one of the students, Orlando, is part of Miami's Brazilian-American community. He's got a cousin Silverio who is both the local drug king, and a practitioner of capoeira himself. And he's better at it than Stevens seems to be. Silverio also has absolutely no compunction about using violence to get what he wants, as we see when he has his underlings try to burn down the school, killing one of Stevens' students, and then trying to kill Stevens at a car chop shop. As you might guess, it's going to come down to a final showdown between Stevens and Silverio with a whole lot of capoeira.

I'd say that Only the Strong one of the better 90s comedies that I've seen, except for the fact that the movie was decidedly not meant to be a comedy. Instead, it's laughably bad, for a whole bunch of reasons. One is that the leads aren't particularly good actors, with a cast of mostly unknowns (at least to me). It's also horrendously formulaic. Now, there are some other movies with similar themes set within a subculture that are just as formulaic; I found myself thinking of Gleaming the Cube which is set in the world of skateboarding. But that movie has charm, while Only the Strong is completely lacking.

There's also a whole bunch of plot holes -- why would everybody other than Stevens insist on using capoeira in their fights just because that's Stevens' preferred martial art? Oh, and it's a technical mess with a big overuse of slow-motion in the capoeira scenes. It's no wonder Only the Strong was a critical and box office bomb.