Truth be told, then I wasn't really expecting much from this movie, and with good cause, because this movie failed to deliver anything mentionable.There aren't all that many Japanese martial arts movies about, and probably with good reason, I assume, as this movie doesn't really do the Japanese martial arts scene much justice.The story in "High Kick Girl!" ("Hai Kikku Gâru!") is almost not existing. The storyline was so weak that even a blind man could see what was failing to going on here. This was so stereotypical that is was just painful to behold. A classic tale of good having to stand up against evil in overwhelming numbers, and of course emerge triumphant. Kei Tsuchiya (played by Rina Takeda) is learning Karate, but falls in with a wrong crowd, and it is up to her sensei Yoshiaki Matsumura (played by Tatsuya Naka) to save her and bring her back on the path of virtue and righteousness.Yeah, fairly standard story here, except that there is basically no acting involved in this movie, and what little there was turned out to be stunted and rigid. And to make matters worse, then the dialogue wasn't overly impressive either. This movie is basically just fighting from start to end, and mind you, not overly great fighting or well-choreographed fighting for that matter.The good parts about the movie was that you could see the kicking actually impacted with people and it was proper kicking, but the punching was half-hearted and weak at best.Now, one thing that really irritated me in this movie, was the constant desire to show the same scene two times, with either a slightly different angle or in slow motion. What were they thinking? "Yeah, we better show the exact same scene again, in case someone just missed it?" It was frustrating and annoying, and it didn't help further the enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the movie one bit.And the final showdown scene was just straight out of the generic end of the movie workbook. Here you had one guy against a whole group of people. And of course, the good guy was dressed in white, while the bad guys were dressed in black. In stead of just rushing and surrounding the good guy, and thus taking him down by sheer force in numbers, the bad guys did the classic, stereotypical thing to do. They filed up in line and came at him one at a time in a single-file straight line; and getting beaten up one at a time, of course. And most impressively, was that once the camera panned out, these defeated people littered the entire floor all around, despite them all coming in at him in a single-filed line. Tch, tch... It was just so brilliantly stupid, that you just can't help laughing at it.It wasn't all bad though. Aside from having to watch the same scene two times in just about every single fight there was, then there were the occasional impressive fight scene or martial arts move here and there. But in overall, the movie was just a shrug of the shoulders and a shake of the head.Having seen this, I have readied myself for what's to come when I put on the "Karate Girl" ("K.G.") movie from 2011 next. Will that be just as bad as this 2009 "High Kick Girl!" movie?"High Kick Girl!" is perhaps best enjoyed as a movie you put on the day after a serious drinking binge when you are nurturing a really bad hang-over and just lay flat on the couch, putting on a movie that requires absolutely nothing from your brain to keep up with.The DVD cover said "more than just a cute high school girl... she's a master of Karate!" - yeah, I will just let that one simmer for a bit as you watch the movie and judge for yourself.

Don't expect complex plot in this one. It's about a high school brown belt karate student who's unusually strong, and goes about beating up black belts in college, and delinquents in other high schools.The movie is one continuous stream of karate action from one scene to another. It's not even worth mentioning what the plot of the story is. The karate action is also pretty fake looking as you can see that the actors are not actually hitting the opponent.A good movie to watch if you have nothing to do on a rainy evening, which is exactly what I did. It's in the genre of mindless entertainment, and as for that it's worth a watch.

If you want 100% realistic fighting, then "High-Kick Girl!" is the movie for you. This is not a perfect film - what martial arts movie is? - but what gets it by is the fact that all the fights in the film, as I said before, are 100% realistic and used no wire-work or CGI (and if they did, they did a damn good job of concealing it in post-production, but I don't think that's the case here)."High-Kick Girl!" is a 100% total Karate kick-fest. It's been awhile since there have been any significant showcases for this beautiful Japanese art stateside, but this flick delivers the goods. Kei Tsuchiya (newcomer Rina Takeda) is a teenage Karate brown belt who displays some incredible fighting skills, yet her master Matsumura (Tatsuya Naka) won't promote her to the coveted black belt rank because he feels she isn't ready for it.To get her "kicks," Kei has earned a reputation on the streets as the notorious "black belt hunter," challenging the highest-ranking students at Karate dojos all over town and taking their black belts as trophies. Through a friend, Kei manages to get an audition for the Kowashiya ("Destroyer") group, a gang of martial arts-trained thugs who control much of the city's organized crime. Kei passes her test by drubbing a group of schoolgirls but is unaware that she is being used as bait to lure her master into a trap. But Kei learns too late when it turns out that the Destroyers have a grudge against Matsumura and are going to use her to draw him out of hiding."High-Kick Girl!" was co-written and directed by first-timer Fuyuhiko Nishi (from his own novel of the same name), and it's an impressive debut. He chooses to use wide-angle shots to capture all the action to give the impression to the viewer that all the fighting and acrobatic stunts are indeed real, and no CGI, wires, or camera trickery was used to enhance them. Also worth noting about the fights themselves is their authenticity: many times it looks as if Rina Takeda and company are really going at it by using full-contact fighting. When someone gets punched (or kicked) in the head, it looks and sounds like it really hurts. It definitely adds to the realism that the movie seems so desperately hard trying to achieve, especially in a genre where realism often takes a backseat to the fantastic (and damn-near impossible). (Most impressive about this particular aspect of the picture is the fact that there's no blood or outlandish gore whatsoever, despite the high-impact intensity and violence of the Karate fighting sequences. Additionally, there's no sex, nudity, or gratuitous shots up Takeda's skirt. And did I mention how strikingly attractive some of Takeda's female sparring partners are?)All of this is a plus in a genre that for a while there, seemed to be on the CGI bandwagon in the wake of "The Matrix" (1999), its sequels, and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000). One last thing is that the fights take up pretty much the entire movie. There isn't a whole lot of time wasted on character development, phony theatrics or dramatics, or unnecessary plot devices. For martial arts movie fans wanting a not-stop fight-fest, this is the movie for you.The problems arise with the uneven script and the director's choice of including slow-motion replays of all the coolest fighting sequences. This is something that hampered the enjoyment of the otherwise fantastic "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior" (2003) and Tony Jaa was wise to abandon this trend for his next feature "The Protector" (2005). The reason it's so unnecessary is because it ruins the tone of the fighting sequences and draws them out, trying the patience of the viewer. The most significant low point of the picture, however, is that Kei starts out as such a high-kicking Karate bad-ass - she's arrogant, yes, and undisciplined and has earned her bragging rights, but she's still a bad-ass - but when she is taken hostage by the Destroyers, she suddenly becomes limp, secondary, and a damsel-in-distress to Matsumura's extremely humbled and disciplined one-man army who has come to try and rescue her.I guess that even with these discrepancies, "High-Kick Girl!" still ends on a good note where Kei has learned a valuable lesson about her experiences and Karate's underlying philosophy about how real power rests in the art's katas ("forms") and not the fists (or legs, for that matter), and that patience and discipline are treasured above all else. Rina Takeda has a great future ahead of her, if she ever chooses that route. Despite her strong skills and being a strikingly attractive young woman (yeah, she's definitely a cutie, in the eyes of this poor male) - and perhaps being the first female martial arts star from Japan since Etsuko Shihomi of the "Sister Street Fighter" films in the mid-'70s - "High-Kick Girl!" is equally Tatsuya Naka's picture, since the stoic, disciplined Karate master becomes a major force in the film's second half, a sort of yin to Takeda's yang.Karate is a strikingly (no pun intended) beautiful art, which I think was perhaps the point of this movie and why the director went to such extreme lengths to showcase the fighters' abilities when duking it out on-screen. Of course, if his script had been better and the film's protagonist wasn't relegated to a secondary role in the third act, this film would have been perfect viewing for any martial arts movie fan.7/10

After Prachya Pinkaew's awesome Chocolate, I've been hungering for more female-starring martial arts movies. This one supposedly stars a teenage girl named Rina Takeda. Takeda isn't that bad in the martial arts department. In fact, all the martial artists seem pretty good at karate. But whoever choreographed the fight scenes was extraordinarily unimaginative, and the director is downright awful. The titular girl starts some trouble and gets her friend and herself kidnapped. They are being used as bait by a local karate gang to lure in her karate teacher (Tatsuya Naka). Much of the movie is actually Naka fighting, so the High Kick Girl is regulated to second banana status for at least half the movie (honestly, I guess I'm not too bothered about that since she's not that attractive anyway). The sound effects are even worse than those old-fashioned chop socky movies from the '70s. The film moves at a sluggish pace, with characters standing around staring at each other or their defeated victims for minutes at a time. To make it worse, the film hasn't even a hint of a sense of humor after the opening sequence (the only part of the film that's even remotely watchable). Each challenger from the evil gang is named for us via subtitles, yet only one of them can take more than two kicks before falling down, presumably dead since the final sequence takes place in a high school gym (did I mention the horribly unimaginative shooting locations?) and Naka beats up like 50 people (way less fun than that sounds). The first guy had to have been lying their for 20 minutes, and still he shows no signs of life. And, saving the worst offense for last, whenever there's a karate move that's even remotely cool, which, in the director's mind, is approximately 90% of every move the characters do, we get to watch it again. Sometimes it's in slow motion, sometimes not, sometimes from a different angle, sometimes not. Once in a while, the shot will literally play at normal speed twice in a row. I estimate that the editor padded this POS out another 30 minutes, bringing its grand total up to 81. To add insult to injury, the credits sequence ostensibly is meant to show us bloopers, in the grand tradition of Jackie Chan. But only in one of the shots can you even tell there's a screw-up. Most of the time you're watching the same fairly unimaginative karate moves for the third time!