Classic Movie Review : Best of the Best (1989)
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Before the UFC was invented in 1993, martial arts movies were “a thing” in popular culture. People in the eighties weren’t more into Karate than we are, but actors like Bruce Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme were their only measuring stick for what the ultimate tough guy might be like. They carried a mystique. People were wondering how they would do in a real fight and most were convinced they could kick some ass because they looked hard on screen.
Whenever something is popular, there’s always an important knockoff culture surrounding it. If Amazon sold Wish.com into reality, great movies like Bloodsport and Kickboxer turned Best of the Best into a forgotten icon. A title that it still deserves today, but for the wrong reasons.
Best of the Best tells the story of Alex Grady (played by a peak-era Eric Roberts), an aging karate champion with a nagging shoulder injury who is given a second chance at glory by virtue of being selected on the U.S National team for an invitational tournament. This is basically it. He trains in a gym with four other dudes for two thirds of the movie and then fights Koreans at the end. Oh, Alex’s son gets hits by a car too and becomes Walter from Breaking Bad.
Looking at the wrong guy
One important thing you need to understand in order to appreciate Best of the Best for what it really is: it’s low key a vanity project by co-star and producer Phillip Rhee who plays a Korean guy named like the drummer of Mötley Crüe in the movie. He’s obviously the only martial artist on the U.S National Team. None of the other guys knows how to even throw a punch, so the movie painstakingly dances around any martial arts scene for almost an hour.
It didn’t really matter then. No one gave a fuck about what real martial arts technique looked like. Audiences wanted hard guys to do hard things like crunches, lifting weights and throwing the occasional haymaker when the circumstances required. While the Korean team does spin kicks, jogs in the snow and gets smacked with bamboo stick to harden their bodies, our guys are basically learning how to throw punches on pads. It’s amazing! Koreans mostly kick their asses too.
Except for Rhee and Roberts, all the U.S National Team guys are stereotypes too. David Agresta is the Italian guy who cannot stop telling people he’s Italian, John Dye is the spiritual nerd and a bloated, end-of-career Chris Penn is the most unconvincing cowboy you’ve ever seen in your life. Of all of them, it’s most obvious that Agresta was not meant to star in a martial arts movie. The poor guy is only featured doing martial arts stuff then need be and it’s not pretty.
Fast forward to the important part
If you’re not interested in catastrophic martial arts, montages of sweaty guys lifting weights or Eric Roberts wearing mom jeans, you can fast forward to the last half hour of the movie. That’s the thing about Best of the Best. It’s terrible at being a straightforwardly good movie, but it does the bare minimum to set up fights with important emotional stakes to them. That’s why people remember Best of the Best today. These fights were really good and they STILL hold up.
I love how Eric Roberts starts every attack of his with a one liners like “you’re mine” or “I’m gonna kick your ass” and gets beaten and bloodied by a seemingly reasonable opponents who loses his cool over the three rounds of their fight. Phillip Rhee’s character actually fights the no.1 pound for pound full contact fighter Dae Han, who killed his brother in competition and it offers some genuine insight into Bushido and martial arts ethics soaked in blood and guts.
Oh, also Dae Han is played by Rhee’s brother Simon. I thought it was a nice touch. If his face tells you something it’s because he’s a very respected stuntman in Hollywood.
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There you have it. Best of the Best is 15 minutes of a serviceable you-killed-my-brother revenge movie and kind of a mess of an eighties martial arts lore film otherwise. I’m always extremely entertained by it because I’m a fan of bad ideas and watching people not knowing what the hell they’re doing, but enjoyment might differ depending on your degree of patience for cocaine era Hollywood shenanigans. It’s not Bloodsport, but it’s good for different reasons.
