Martial artist Dragon Pak travels to the U.S. from Korea to find his sister who has gone missing. Shortly after arriving, Dragon runs into hard nosed Lieutenant Dana “Hawk” Hawkins, who is busy carrying out an investigation, against her captain’s wishes, that involves a series of girls turning up dead, one of which is her sister. Turns out that there may be a connection with these dead girls and the disappearance of Dragon’s sister. The two team up and find themselves going up against the evil Therion; a criminal mastermind who has created a brand new drug that brainwashes its users. The dead girls were all test subjects of this experimental drug. Dragon needs to find his sister before she joins Hawk’s sister on a slab in the morgue.
“Somewhere between Xena and Lethal Weapon, Dragon and the Hawk combines humor, high energy music and incredible martial arts into an hour and a half of pure entertainment.” This is what it actually says on the back of the video box. Now, let’s take a closer look at this claim.
“Somewhere between Xena and Lethal Weapon…” – Hmmm…I can understand the Lethal Weapon reference because this is kind of a buddy cop action flick, but I wanna know where they got “Xena” from. I also like how they say “somewhere”, like they don’t know where the hell it lies either. I’ll give it a more accurate shot and say it lies several paces behind “Double Impact” and “Martial Law”.
“…humor…” – If that’s humor stinking up this pile, then somebody needs to go back to funny class. Actually that’s a tad unfair. It’s true that the jokes in themselves aren’t funny at all, but it’s the way they’re delivered by the aloof Julian Jung Lee that had me cackling quite a few times. So terrible is this guy’s acting job that you can’t help but laugh.
“…high energy music…” – Nothing really out of the ordinary here. Some of the creepy atmospheric stuff is alright, but it’s what you come to expect from Z grade action movies. Of course, there’s also the cheesy guitar rock for the fight scenes and bass plucking for the “suspenseful” creeping around moments.
“…incredible martial arts…” – There’s a couple of okay fights, but for the most part, the martial arts seem wooden and too staged. There’s even a couple of goofball moves where you can tell they were trying to be sassy, but looked like fools instead.
“…pure entertainment…” – There must be a textbook out there on how to make a dull Z grade action movie because it looks like “Dragon and the Hawk” follows it play by play. There’s a million of these uninspired bores floating around out there. If watching wooden block characters, lifeless fights and overkill clichés is your cup of joe, then sure, “pure entertainment” is in store for you.
“Dragon and the Hawk” is the kind of movie that’ll have you writing hate mail to Cinemax because they’re playing this stuff at 2 in the morning instead of some skin flick like they should be doing.
