Rating: **
Review Date: 8/25/25
Cast: Sonny Chiba, Kojiro Hongo, Masashi Ishibashi
"Power without justice is only violence."
The final film in the highly fictionalized Mas Oyama trilogy. Oyama, portrayed by his real-life pupil Sonny Chiba, was a Korean-born karate master and the founder of full contact Kyokushin Karate. In the film, he's a gangster who spends his free time picking fights at various karate dojos. Before long, he gets a job offer to move to Okinawa and make money as a professional wrestler with wrestler Yamashita and Judo expert Fujita (Kojiro Hongo), but gets in trouble when he refuses to play by the rules. On his way back to the mainland, his belongings are stolen by a bunch of orphan kids and the film takes a radical turn into crazy land. Homeless and broke, he gets messed up with a prostitute, the local Yakuza, the orphan gang, as well as Yamashita and Fujita again. The climax features Oyama and Fujita storming the bad guy's mansion, which turns into a ridiculous rip-off of the hall of mirrors scene in Bruce Lee's "Enter The Dragon" (1973).
The film wastes no time giving the audience exactly what they want, and the first twelve minutes are a dojo fight that culminates in a one-on-one battle with frequent bad guy Masashi Ishibashi. Everyone else in the film is just a punching bag for Sonny Chiba, but facing off with Masashi Ishibashi allows for a lot more variety and dramatic tension, not to mention raw skill. Unfortunately, the film is a narrative mess and feels like a "make it up as you go" production with no structure or purpose. The wrestling scenes are tedious and tiresome, and amusingly include captions for the moves that the American wrestlers use on the hapless Japanese. The final battle actually looks like it was tacked on as an afterthought, possibly because the logical ending was too depressing and didn't offer the audience a sense of closure and righteous justice. Not a great film, but definitely one that Chiba enthusiasts will want to check out.