High Kick Girl

Casts : Rina Takeda, Tatsuya Naka, Sayaka Akimoto

The movie High Kick Girl stars Rina Takeda (a 1st Degree Black Belt in Karate with the Ryukyu/Okinawan Shorin-Ryu Karate-Do Genshin Kai in real life) as Kei Tsuchiya, who eagerly wants to have a black belt. But her master, Yoshiaki Matsumura (Tatsuya Taka) won’t allow her to be promoted due to her “bad ways.” Tsuchiya always took “kata practice” for granted and always want to challenge other dojos to show how strong she is. As a token, she took black belts from the defeated dojo leader, in which she earned the title, “Black Belt Hunter.”

High Kick Girl Movie Review

Later, she was recruited as a member of a “martial artists for hire” group called The Destroyers. As an entrance test, she was asked to go to a abandoned room where her target resides. Here, she faced AKB48 Member Sayaka Akimoto (real life Black Belt in Aikido) and fellow karate-idol Yuka Kobayashi. She later knew that it was just a bait to call for her master, to whom The Destoyer’s leader, Ryusoku, who hold grudge to Matsumura to what happened to him 15 years ago. In an attempt to warn her master, Tsuchiya went to his solitary place. But she was then followed by other Destroyer members and get abducted. To save his student, Matsumura went to The Destroyer’s hideout, alone, where he saw Tsuchiya and her friend Ryosuke held hostage…

High Kick Girl Movie Review

On to our High Kick Girl movie review:
As soon as I see High Kick Girl’s movie poster, plus the trailer looks cool, it kinda hyped me up since I just recently saw the original Karate Kid movies, and this might quenched my thirst for karate/martial arts themed movie, besides from the fact that it is a Japanese movie. Another thing that made me interested to see this movie is because of Rena Takeda.

Undoubtedly, Rena Takeda is cute especially since she is in a school girl uniform here. You know, it’s one of my weakness. LOL. XD And being a karate practitioner herself, it made it more awesome. It seems…

But (yeah there’s a big letdown in this movie) I’m greatly disappointed with High Kick Girl. Takeda’s cuteness and awesome butt kicking from the start of the movie doesn’t save it from being a major disappointment. And I would like to point it out here:

First: Every fight scene in the High Kick Girl movie has a corresponding slow motion scene. It’s kinda irritating seeing the scenes gets repeated every time. Besides, even though it looked natural during its normal frame speed, putting it into slow motion made the fight scenes faker than fake. And if you are not used on hearing “Kyaa”, “Yaa”, and similar karate shouts, you might get irritated hearing it over and over again.

High Kick Girl Movie Review

Second: High Kick Girl lacks good fighting BGMs. The music they played on every fight scene made me bored and just want that to finish as soon as possible. The only fight scene that has a good BGM is when Tsuchiya undergo her entrance test for The Destroyers. The BGM is undoubtedly the movie’s main theme.

Third: Ryosoku, The Destroyer’s leader, and even Matsumura, didn’t even revealed what happened 15 years ago and what the grudge is all about. High Kick Girl basically, must tackle those parts since it is the motive of The Destroyer’s revenge on Matsumura.

High Kick Girl Movie Review

Forth: The climax of High Kick Girl is very dull. A climax should bring the audience stand to their seats and it should be the peak of the show. There’s no major fight between Tsuchiya, her master, and The Destroyers. It’s just a one on one fight with a lame fighting sequence.

The movie High Kick Girl can greatly be appreciated by die-hard karate fans and practitioners. It can be considered as a welcome throwback to the golden age of straight-up karate movies since there are lots of real life martial artists in this movie.

All in all, High Kick Girl is a good yet disappointing movie. Good, it’s because Rena Takeda’s cuteness and buttkicking awesomeness, and they made a martial arts movie with no CGI and near reality karate fighting. Disappointing, since it just made me want to have those 2 wasted hours back to me. If only those slow-mos wasn’t included in the movie, it could have been much better. The movie itself has lots of places for improvements.