Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

It seems like only days ago, maybe because it was, that I saw my main man Hector Echavarria’s last movie ‘Never Surrender’ which, well… was pretty awful. But as bad as that festival of fight scenes, awful acting and silicone filled breasts may have been I still managed to squeeze some entertainment value from that movie. Now I believe Hector directed ‘Never Surrender’ but this time Mr. Echavarria is content to just produce, write and star turning over the directing reigns to Veteran director Bill Corcoran. Now the last two movies of Mr. Corcoran’s I’ve seen where ‘Vipers’ and ‘Rise of the Gargoyles’ which… gee… were actually worse than ‘Never Surrender’ so I don’t know if that was such a wise move. Nonetheless as it turns out, if one were trying to decide which of the two, that is between this movie ‘Death Warrior’ and ‘Never Surrender’ was the better movie, it’s kind of a wash as they are pretty much the same movie chock full of fight scenes, terrible acting silicone filled breasts.

Our film opens in The Octagon where Wolf (Quentin ‘Rampage’ Jackson) is doing battle with some dude with the winner getting a chance at the super duper undefeated champion Reinero (Echavarria) who is sitting ring side. Thing is Wolf and Reinero are really good friends, but Reinero’s wife Kira (Tanya Clarke) doesn’t care about any of that and just wants her man to shut it down and spend his time with her. Reinero plans to do just that, after a couple more fights to pad that bank account, which upsets this wife but does eventually lead to an elongated sex scene. This might only be my second Echavarria flick by I know damn well that my man is going to write himself in an elongated sex scene or two. It is because of that I’m of dying to see one his shooting scripts. It probably contains sections such as ‘Reinero buries his head between Kira’s melons’ followed by ‘Reinero then has Kira bent over the side of the couch…’ I’m betting he goes into complex detail when it comes to this part of his movies.

Getting some lovin’ is cool but what sucks is that moment after the lovin’ when armed commandos bust up in your crib, beat the hell out you, slap your woman around and Nick Mancuso walks in overacting his ass off as the character of Ivan and injects your

woman with a death poison that only he has the anecdote for. Gotta hate it when that happens. Ivan just wants Reinero to participate in his closed circuit underground fights, all fought to the death and featuring the best fighters around the world. Reinero doesn’t want to do this but damn, this nut injected death juice into his woman so what choice does he have?

What Ivan doesn’t know is how smart a guy Reinero is and that he’s formulating a plan to get that ass and end that worthless life of his. Of course while Reinero formulates this plan he has to completely murderize some his best friends in the process but sometimes that’s the way it has to be. Insanity and over the top silliness will ensue.

While it’s early in Hector Echavarria’s filmmaking career, so far he’s making some pretty bad movies but I’ll tell you this, as long as he keeps making ‘em I’ll keep watching ‘em. For real. There was a scene in this movie where is his wife is poisoned, eyes black and sunken into her head, she’s doubled over in pain at death’s door yet they still found a way to squeeze in some elongated simulated sex. You can’t beat that with a stick. Maybe since she’s dying and all she was thinking she may as well brave the intensely severe gastrointestinal death pain and get that ‘O’ one last time, despite the fact she can barely breathe. Perhaps that wasn’t the best time for sex, but what the hell.

Even though the acting overall was still pretty bad in this one, Echavarria the screenwriter did lift a lot of the heavy stuff off his Ultimate Fighting buddies and simply had them stand by until they were required to do what they do best. Georges St. Pierre said absolutely nothing, Quentin Jackson said next to nothing, Rashad Evans only spoke when he was talking trash in the middle of the ring, which I’m sure he does anyway… that was best staged fight of the movie by the way… with only Keith Jardine given any significant lines, and he didn’t do too bad with them.

While you might think taking the load of the fighters and putting it all on the shoulders of our one real acting veteran, Nick Mancuso, would be a good thing… well… not so much. Man, I’ve been a Mancuso guy since ‘Stingray’ so nobody better not say nothing bad about Nick Mancuso around me… but his wild googly eyed performance in this one was a different approach, to say the least. He really let it all hang out in this one. If he had chosen to dial it down a notch or two, I wouldn’t have been mad at him but uh... yeah. Patrick Kilpatrick in the previous movie as a wild googly eyed Russian worked a little bit. A sixty two year old guy named Mancuso as a wild eyed googly eyed insanely over-acting Russian is probably not the angle I would’ve taken with Nick. And why does Echavarria hate Russians?

Yes, ‘Death Warrior’ isn’t a good movie and in fact some may consider it to be gawdawful but it does have plenty of fight scenes and there are plenty of swollen breasts to gander at in addition to Mr. Mancuso’s googly eyed performance which is almost an acting case study. While I don’t necessarily see these Echavarria joints improving as time goes on, none of that is going to stop me from watching.