Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Showdown in Little Tokyo!

 

WE
WERE IN FACT
SHOGUNS N SHEEIT

At a lean 75 minutes, Showdown in Little Tokyo shows just how little plot and characterisation you can get away with in favour of action and banter and still produce something more entertaining than anything your normoid friends bug you to watch on Net Flix Plus Prime. Dolph Lundgren is the weeaboo cop out to avenge his parents' death at the hands of a yakuza thug. Brandon Lee is his bemused half-Azn partner who has no idea who Asuka and Rei are, or why it matters which is best. Tia Carrere is the hottie in the white tank top who falls for Lundgren's BWC.

Actual dialogue.

And Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is the villain, who is such an asshole he lets an underling dismember himself and present his severed finger to him in penance for failure, before killing him anyway.

In another scene he films himself decapitating a crack ho and then plays it back to Carrere while he rapes her. That's not a joke: he's just hilariously cuntish at every opportunity.

Lundgren and Lee team up to investigate Tagawa's nefarious plan to sell meth or whatever, which leads them through such cinematic vistas as this sushi bar where mobsters eat lunch off of naked chicks. I'm not aware that such places really exist but since knowing anything about Japanese culture has been rendered low-status by the weeb-shaming endemic in the neurotypical west, I'm going to feign ignorance and assume this is a ubiquitous Japanese custom.

Censored for icky female nipples.

Although it's nominally a buddy cop flick, there's a notable lack of any sort of chief or commissioner character dressing down our heroes for their reckless and flagrantly illegal antics, and the writers are well aware that they're not even trying to sell these guys as cops, as in one scene they emerge from a battle with the yakuza to see a cop car and high-tail it themselves.

The genius of lines like this is like a forgotten technology.

In fact, it's one of the few films I've seen that could stand to have a little more of that fillery background stuff, as you can easily imagine early drafts featuring more scenes of Lee listening incredulously as Lundgren waxes otaku about Godzilla movies and the power levels of Dragon Ball Z characters. The movie was cut heavily as a result of studio meddling and received a limited release to join the vast majority of movies that have generally been forgotten. On the other hand, there's nothing in the final cut that would suggest the plot ever involved much actual police work.

Lundgren demonstrates the sophisticated techniques familiar from JCS interrogation videos.

It's moreso just a movie about a couple of affable Chads becoming bros and killing an asshole in spectacular fashion. Lundgren and Lee are so likable you don't even really mind the movie skipping over the traditional tensions-between-the-unalike cops-gradually-giving-way-to-mutual-respect routine, because in real life any two guys with jaws like these two would just bond and excel effortlessly anyway. Were Hollywood not driven by the seething resentment of the dweebs, this type of Chadcore would prevail over the box office year round.

Somewhere Elliott Rodger is throwing another bitchfit.