Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the genre relics that raised us. This week: The Perfect Weapon.
The Perfect Weapon and a New Karate Action Star
35 years ago, The Perfect Weapon introduced audiences to Jeff Speakman and American Kenpo Karate. Unfortunately, Speakman’s career never really took off, leaving The Perfect Weapon behind as a kind of martial arts movie time capsule, a frozen moment in time when studios were willing to shell out the big bucks to hopefully find their next karate action hero.
And even though The Perfect Weapon didn’t set the box office on fire, it left a mark on martial arts cinema and remains a beloved movie by fans who still enjoy it and by those of us who were inspired by it.
The Rise of the Karate Movie
After Bruce Lee kicked the door in on action cinema in the 1970s, the 1980s became a boom era for martial arts movies.
The decade mostly belonged to guys like Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Sho Kosugi, and Don “the Dragon” Wilson, stars who churned out everything from mainstream studio pictures to direct to video schlock.
Then in 1988, Steven Seagal entered the chat with his own brand of aggressive aikido and once again, showed American audiences something they’d never seen before.
It seemed like Hollywood had finally run out of exotic martial arts to exploit.
But then in 1991, newcomer Jeff Speakman came out of nowhere with his special brand of super fast, kinetic karate.
The Perfect Weapon was basically an advertisement for Ed Parker’s American Kenpo Karate, and while the plot wasn’t super original, it showcased some of the best fight scenes ever put down on film at that point.
Speakman’s career lasted about as long as one of his opponents in the movie, but The Perfect Weapon remains one of the best karate movies to come out of that era.
The Back of the VHS Tape
Speakman plays Jeff Sanders, a drifter, estranged from his family, and working as a laborer on a road repair crew in a neighboring state. When Kim, an old family friend played by Mako, becomes the target of the local Korean mafia, Jeff heads home to lend a hand.
As Jeff makes the drive home, the movie flashes back to his childhood.
Still grieving his mom’s death, young Jeff has become a problem child for his dad Carl, an LA cop raising two boys on his own. Carl considers enrolling him in a military school when Kim suggests he try kenpo school first.
Carl agrees and young Jeff quickly learns to channel his anger into his study of the martial arts. But when a high school bully smacks his younger brother Adam, Jeff springs into action, leaving the bully badly injured.
Carl is not impressed with Jeff’s lack of restraint and kicks him out of the house, fearing he will be a bad influence on Adam.
Back in the present, Jeff arrives at Kim’s import business in Koreatown as his friend is being shaken down by mafia enforcers. Jeff quickly dispatches the thugs and Kim assures him it was all a misunderstanding that can be smoothed over.
But that evening while Jeff is away, Tanaka (played by Professor Toru Tanaka) murders Kim as punishment for rejecting the mafia’s protection racket.
When Jeff finds his friend dead, he vows revenge.
The Perfect Weapon isn’t terribly original. But in a genre packed with underground fight ring movies and police and super soldier stories, Speakman’s everyman construction worker keeps the action grounded in hand-to-hand combat.
And it also builds a few flaws into him.
Jeff may be physically nearly indestructible, but his lack of street smarts gets him into trouble on more than one occasion.
He comes across as a bit of a blockhead, and those flaws and mistakes make him seem more real and relatable.
Why Koreatown?
But if Jeff was relatable, the setting was anything but.
The Perfect Weapon was shot in and around LA, which seemed completely exotic to me as a teen growing up in a small town. It has the same vibe as so many other movies from this era shot in Southern California. Movies like Showdown in Little Tokyo, Lethal Weapon, and They Live.
A vibe I affectionately call the LA Vibe, for lack of a better way of describing it.
Little Tokyo stands in for Koreatown, but I’m not sure that it even matters, because this movie mixes elements of different Asian cultures together like it’s one of those Asian buffets.
You’ve got Chinese and Japanese Americans playing Koreans, but Koreans with Japanese and Chinese last names. Korean mob bosses are referred to as Oyabun–a Japanese term. And as far as I can tell, only one person with a speaking part in the whole movie even has Korean heritage.
In all honesty, I have no idea why the filmmakers didn’t just set the film in Little Tokyo. American Kenpo is an amalgamation of Asian martial arts. But the one Asian martial culture American Kenpo doesn’t borrow from as far as I know is Korean.
There’s no taekwondo or tang soo do or kuk sul won anywhere in Parker’s system. Again, as far as I know.
So setting the movie in Koreatown and making Mako’s character Kim introduce Jeff to “kenpo school”–as though it were some old Korean system–makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Except for one possibility we’ll come back to later.
The Fights are What We’re Here For
Not that any of this hair splitting really matters as far as the filmmakers are concerned, though, because the beating heart of The Perfect Weapon is in its fight scenes.
The filmmakers might not have known the difference between sushi and kimchi, but as soon as Jeff Speakman starts kicking guys’ asses, all of that goes out the window.
Now I really wanted to break down each fight scene, because they’re just soooo good. But I found out that gets real tedious, real fast. So I’ll spare you the play-by-play and just say: if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth it for the fights alone.
Speakman is fast.
By the time you register that he’s hit a guy, he’s already hit three more and blocked a few punches and kicks in the process.
The way he chains together blocks and strikes is just so satisfying to watch.
But he can kick too.
When he fights James Lew and the other two guys in the taekwondo club, he throws several skillful and very fast high section kicks. Including a few jump kicks.
He’s no Van Damme, but he’s able to hang in there with James Lew, who is a phenomenal kicker, and that’s pretty good in my book. And Lew gives him a real run for his money in this scene. But just when you think our hero hasn’t got the goods, he lets loose a crazy series of super fast knifehands and hammerfists that, stitched together with the sound effects, result in one of the movie’s more memorable fight scenes.
And the really cool thing is that Speakman choreographed those fight scenes together with American Kenpo founder Ed Parker. Speakman was even given final edit and final sound check on those fight scenes.
And you can tell, because the level of coordination with the sound and the choreography just sell the hell out of the realism of those fights.
The Stars
Now there’s not much point in talking a lot about direction or cinematography, but I do want to talk about some of the actors.
First of all, I love Mako. And I have since he played Akiro the wizard in Conan the Barbarian. But he’s great in everything, and he just makes everything he’s in better.
The Perfect Weapon is no exception.
He brings a warmth to the character of Kim that really brings him to life. It’s a bummer when the character dies, but the movie is better with him in it.
Seth Sakai plays Jeff’s Kenpo instructor, Master Lo. Sakai never attained the level of fame and prestige as Mako, but he was one of those actors that popped up all across genre film and television. He had roles in Magnum PI, Hawaii Five-O, Airwolf, and a personal favorite–Raven, a ninja show that was regrettably canceled after one season.
Professor Toru Tanaka was the stage name of Hawaiian actor Charles Kalani. He had roles in The Running Man alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, and made an appearance as a bodyguard in Revenge of the Ninja with Sho Kosugi, as well as appearing in episodes of The A-Team and Airwolf.
He plays Tanaka, the hitman ordered to kill Kim at the beginning of the movie.
But one interesting tidbit about Tanaka that I didn’t know until recently is that he was a childhood friend of Ed Parker. Speakman talks about him in an interview on martial arts action star Scott Adkins’ YouTube channel and has a bunch of really nice things to say about him. Definitely worth checking out, if you are into these kinds of movies.
Another favorite of mine from this era is Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who also plays a bad guy here. He also starred in Rising Sun alongside Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery, as well as Showdown in Little Tokyo, Mortal Kombat, and many, many others.
Tagawa passed away late last year, and I was sad to hear he had passed. He will be missed.
James Lew doesn’t have much of a role in this movie, but he’s in about a million of these martial arts films as a bad guy or henchman, and he’s just great. Always fun to watch, and extremely skilled as a martial artist, I love seeing him present a challenge to Speakman here.
It’s probably not worth mentioning, but I think one of the other guys Speakman fights in the taekwondo dojang is the same guy that fights Lorenzo Lamas in a scene in Night of the Warrior. I can’t find his name anywhere, though, so he must be a stuntman that didn’t get billed as an actor.
If you haven’t seen Night of the Warrior, I recommend it to you, but only if you like the weird. It’s not really a martial arts movie per se, but it was written by Thomas Ian Griffith–the guy that played Terry Silver in The Karate Kid franchise.
James Hong is another actor like Mako who seemed like he was everywhere when I was a kid. He plays bad guy Yung here, but is probably best known for his role in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. There’s not much to his role, but Hong is a welcome addition to the cast here and is always great to see in movies from this era.
John Dye plays Jeff’s younger brother Adam. Dye didn’t have a big career, but he did star in one of my favorite karate movies from this era alongside Eric Roberts and Phillio Rhee–Best of the Best. He sadly passed away at the young age of 47 from a drug overdose.
Clyde Kusatsu has a very minor role here as a police detective, but I wanted to mention him because he’s another one of those actors that was just everywhere in the 80s and 90s. Movies, TV, you name it. He was in Rising Sun, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and starred in episodes of MASH, ALF, and MacGuyver among others.
Last but not least, Mariska Hargitay has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her role in this. In the TV edit of the film, her character is a love interest for Speakman’s character. And that’s the version I grew up with, so when I finally got the movie on DVD, I was confused as to why she was nearly cut completely from the movie.
You can still find the version with her scenes intact on YouTube. Her scenes don’t add much to the movie, which is probably why they were cut, but I prefer that version probably just because it’s the one I watched as a teen in the 90s.
When We Still Believed in Magic
Now speaking of the 90s, when we talk about decades, we talk about them as if those ten years have been sealed away in a vacuum.
But history’s not really that neat. There’s no director yelling “Cut” at the end of the decade, letting you know one era has ended and another is about to begin.
The first couple of years of the 90s are sort of a weird moment in time. Technically not the 80s, but spiritually still clinging to the essence of that decade.
The Perfect Weapon exists in that brief moment in time. Still bright-eyed and optimistic. Still open to a world of possibility and magic.
A decade later, the internet would begin to grind the mystique of the Asian martial arts under the ever-marching boot of debate and progress. The term “bullshido” became popularized during this time.
Now don’t get me wrong, criticism is good. Information is good. But there’s something about those innocent days of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s when the mystery of the Asian martial arts was still very much alive. For many of us, it was the thing that got us into the martial arts in the first place.
Now we know way too much.
We’ve got YouTube experts, forums, slow-motion analysis, randos in comment sections imparting wisdom as if they were the embodiment of Yoda and Miyagi combined. Whole martial traditions have been weighed, measured, and tossed out completely by the internet.
And again—there’s value in scrutinizing these systems that are designed to protect people’s lives.
The End of the Karate Movie Era
But it has had an impact on the stories we tell ourselves.
Instead of just experiencing these movies, we evaluate ‘em.
Instead of wondering “Wow, how does that work?” we scoff and say “Eh, that would never work.”
And those are two very different reactions.
Movies like The Perfect Weapon were built for the first. They were built to entertain and to inspire wonder.
They rely on a version of the martial arts that’s a little bigger than reality. Where fights are like coordinated dances and one man could walk into a room and just dismantle everyone in it—not because it’s realistic, but because it’s fun.
It’s impossible to suspend disbelief like that now unless the movie is explicitly fantasy.
That’s why movies like this don’t really exist anymore. Not like this anyway. You either get grounded, hyper-real action…or you get superheroes. There’s not much room left for the guy in the middle—the construction worker with a set of skills and a LOT of determination.
And that’s what The Perfect Weapon represents to me.
A time when we didn’t think we knew everything.
And that left room for wonder.
The Perfect Weapon’s Legacy
When I was 15 or 16, my parents gave me the gift of martial arts lessons for my birthday. Our town had a taekwondo school, and I had no idea what that was, but they wore colored belts and it basically looked like karate, so I was all in from the get go.
But I had an appetite for martial arts, and I wanted to learn as many of them as possible. When The Perfect Weapon came along, I had never heard of that particular style. There certainly weren’t any schools near me.
But I loved what I saw.
As a taekwondo student and a tall guy, I was into the kicking aspect of the martial arts. But the way Speakman used his hands totally fascinated me. Every block a strike and every strike a block–was a totally new approach to self defense for me.
And then to add on top of that his use of the escrima sticks–it was exotic but also about as basic as you can get. As far as martial arts weapons go, the thing you are most likely to find is a stick or sticks. It seemed practical but also utterly fascinating.
I took a hacksaw to an old broom handle, set up a dummy behind the house, and copied every move Speakman made in that movie. I’d spend hours out there going at it.
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I was having fun doing it.
Kenpo vs Taekwondo?
Now remember when I said it makes no sense to set this movie in Koreatown, except for one possibility?
Although “karate” came to be a placeholder term for just about any and all kind of Asian martial arts, the reality is that Korean taekwondo was taking the country by storm. And if The Perfect Weapon was meant to showcase Ed Parker’s system, it stands to reason he and Speakman would want to knock the big kid on the block down a peg or two.
Now I don’t know if that is the case–it’s pure speculation on my part. But it does make sense from a business perspective.
And it kinda worked, because I eventually ended up training in Ed Parker’s system for a time, once I got to the city and found a school. And Speakman says in his interview with Adkins that the movie helped the worldwide kenpo community, so I say good for them.
So if Best of the Best was a commercial for taekwondo, I suppose it only makes sense that The Perfect Weapon is Kenpo’s answer to it. And if it was, more power to em.
The Perfect Weapon 2, Please
When I revisit The Perfect Weapon now–some thirty plus years later–I remember those late nights working my ad hoc dummy over. Kicking and punching the bag. Imagining I was someone tougher and meaner than I actually was.
Those are good memories. And The Perfect Weapon, though admittedly not high cinematic art, is still a good time for me. I see the flaws and I almost love the film more for them.
Speakman’s career failed to launch, and he never starred in anything approaching the level of The Perfect Weapon. Though, side note, you remember Speed? That little movie with Keanu Reeves that made about a bajillion dollars? Speakman had signed a 4 picture deal with Paramount and Speed was planned to be his next movie after The Perfect Weapon. But when leadership changed at Paramount, the script was put into turnaround and 20th Century picked it up.
Which is too bad, really. He was probably never gonna be much of an actor…but I’d trade a truckload of modern movies for 3 or 4 more straight-up martial arts movies like The Perfect Weapon.
Kung Pew Video is where I dig into the neon-drenched, straight-to-VHS corner of film history. New episodes weekly. Be kind. Subscribe. See ya in the VHS wasteland.
