Karate Girl (K.G.)
- Fundamentals, reception.
- Japanese live action feature length film, 2011, NR, 91 minutes; spoken word is in Japanese; subtitles in English.
- IMDB: 5.6/10.0 from 217 audience ratings.
- Rotten Tomatoes: 'No reviews yet...', 31% liked it from 50 audience ratings.
- Netflix: 3.2/5.0 from 3,480 audience ratings.
- Directed by:Yoshikatsu Kimura.
- Starring: Rina Takeda as Ayaka Kurenai, Richard Heselton as Keith.
- Setup and Plot
- 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?
- Conclusions
- One line summary: Absurd fantasy; complete waste of production values.
- One star of five. If one must do a 'strong female' action film, get a strong, trained, experienced female actress or two, not zero.
- 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.
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