There was nothing personal when Matt Damon kicked Scott Adkins into the groin. Life as a professional martial screen fighter had dragged Adkins from Hong Kong to Bulgaria and everywhere in between, consuming a lot of fouls. This particular slip-up on the 2007 set of The Bourne Ultimatum really did hurt because it was a tough one. This was the era of Hollywood casting, where Academy Award winners like Damon took the lead role in action movies, and guys like Adkins, the trained film warrior, beat him when stunts went awry.
43-year-old Adkins is an action star in the style of Jean-Claude Van Damme, a handsome and charismatic performer who can turn a kick high enough to pinch a guy’s head. If Hollywood blockbusters like Doctor Strange or The Brothers Grimsby need a martial artist who can actually rip up walls or drop with a pair of pistols, call them Adkins. In the third Bourne movie, he played an ungrateful CIA officer in favor of the dizzying karate blows of Damon’s supersoldiers. The role was exactly what he needed as an actor to break into studio films in 2007, but in retrospect, this was also a time when the action genre as a whole went down.
“When the Bourne movies came out, they found out how to shake the camera so that you can somehow disguise the actor’s mistakes,” he told me last summer. I’m calling from London. “Paul Greengrass knows what he’s doing, I would not do it that way, but I understand why he does it.”
Whether you blame choppy editing, tricky framing or CGI, the sun went down for actors with physical ability and skill. Why Engage a Karate Expert When A Listeners Can Be Turned into Killer Machines in Post Production?
Adkins remembers Greengrass telling him, “Scott, the less you see, the more you believe.” But for a particular action star, seeing is the key. “I’d like to see it and believe it,” Adkins said. “That’s the ideal situation, but it’s damned hard work.”
In the 2000s Adkins found his way through Hollywood and became the leading man for a band of filmmakers who believed in “damned hard work”. Outlaw Vern, directors such as John Hyams (the sequels to Universal Soldier) or Jesse V. Johnson (the acclaimed Triple Threat and Auction of 2019) are in favor of this modern action pantheon, created by martial arts magazines, film bloggers, and writers such as writers known to craft the best combat scenes of the last decade in 90-minute rockets or less.
Not unlike the special actor-director partnerships of Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson or Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Isaac Florentine, a martial artist and seasoned B-movie director with a great reputation as a filmmaker, made Adkins the best direct-to-video fighter. Ninja: Shadow of a tear was her taxi driver. A series of spin-off sequels to 2002’s Walter Hills Drama Undisputed, in which prison boxes were swapped for MMA cage, achieved a synthesis of raging bull-level talents. None of her films required Oscar winners to fake a ball check.
Adkins and Florentine both have an almost religious commitment to old-school action films, yet they differ greatly in the way they approach their careers. Florentine is a self-described director who likes to maintain his status as a cult favorite. Adkins wants nothing more than to compete with Tom Cruise and Keanu Reeves for the lead role as posters.
“I get the following news on Facebook:” Why do not you go to play James Bond? Why are not you in a Marvel movie? “Adkins said.” Well, I would, if offered, would not I? Ultimately, however, I can only deal with what I am offered. “
“He should be the next James Bond,” Florentine told me later. “I think Scott should be an A-Lister. He is an excellent actor and a great film fighter. ”
How these two true believers found each other is a window on how the action genre has survived well into the 21st century, and the unique, if lesser known, creators who have done the hard work to keep it alive.
Isaac Florentine conducts Scott Adkins (left) in a fight for Undisputed III.
Courtesy of Millennium Films
For the 61-year-old Florentine films and martial arts are fatefully interwoven.
When he grew up in Israel in the 1970s, he saw Hong Kong imports like Enter the Dragon (1973) and Fist of Fury (1972) around the same time that the first karate dojos were opened in the tiny post-war Tel Aviv.
This was before The Karate Kid (1985) turned the martial arts into a youth fever. It was still the domain of tough guys looking to kick their asses and shape their bodies. The discipline was also stricter and more formal. A young Florentine has managed to assert himself against confounding older fighters with a kick he learned when he watched Bruce Lee: “When I was a little kid, I kicked everyone in the ribs.”
Florentine fell in love with each other on the Saturday matinees. You Only Live Twice was a revelation. The good, the bad and the ugly was a greater revelation. He liked John Wayne, but preferred spaghetti westerns over American films because they were “pinpointed”. Inspired, Florentine began shooting 8mm home videos between the karate training sessions.
After two years of military service, he opened his own martial arts school and joined the Tel Aviv University Film Program. His capstone project “Farewell, Terminator,” a post-apocalyptic screenplay set in a crumbling district of Tel Aviv, won the student prize, though some judges dropped the violent script out of hand. The 30-minute film combined Florentine’s martial arts with eye-catching shootings and stunts straight out of American low-budget action movies.
After college, an actual career in film seemed like a distant possibility. Israel had no significant film industry and Hollywood was far away. For his part, Florentine would have been content to run a dojo and teach history. Then he saw a little movie called American Ninja.
The story of a US Army Private and Amnesian receiving a secret order from Filipino Ninjas was courtesy of Israeli producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan’s Cannon Group. Known for a certain kind of American B-movie – jingoistic, violent, silly in the way of a midnight movie – a Cannon movie has a lot to do with a bit. Movies like invasion USA, The Delta Force and Enter the Ninja were cheap but exciting exercises in pure genre filmmaking. The mixture of bombast and efficiency of American Ninja has made Florentine a career in film. He remembers saying to his wife, “I think I can make a movie like that.”
Fox TV
In 1988, the aspiring director moved to Los Angeles with his family. Until then, he had collected some fight choreographies before he met Golan, who gave him an attempt to stage a feature film. The 1992 Desert Kickboxer, the story of a retired Navajo policeman dealing with a Mexican drug lord in the middle of the Arizona desert, was sturdy and cheap. This served as a template for the years to come.
Cannon collapsed shortly after the release of Desert Kickboxer and destroyed what would have been a natural habitat for Florentine. Fortunately, another opportunity arose: Fox Kids transformed the Japanese television series Super Sentai into Power Rangers and tried to mix the existing footage with new English-language material. The Japanese footage was edited in the camera (as in, each shot was composed as if for final editing) so that American producers had less master shots and over-the-shoulder coverage – the bread and butter of TV production ,
“It was like water and oil. They were not talking, “said Florentine, whose name came up as someone who could help bring the styles in line. “If you shoot action, you can not shoot a master, because each segment has to be composed to glorify the action.” In the first season, for example, he has mounted a camera on a trash can lid and turned it like a Frisbee.
At about the same time, former Cannon producer Avi Lerner finally found a groove with his new company Nu Image, a home for B-movies. (Lerner would eventually split off Millennium Films, best known for Olympus Has Fallen and his sequels). Florentine settled in the folds and directed Dolph Lundgren to Bridge of Dragons, while remaining with Power Rangers, who he considered a “test lab” for shooting. The battle scenes between costumed teenagers gave him countless opportunities to refine his craft, make fewer cuts and mix more idiosyncratic angles and camera movements.
Perhaps it would have been different if Florentine had not made his “biggest mistake” in his career in 1995: directing Xena: rejecting Warrior Princess to make WMAC Masters, a wacky WWE for arcade inspired martial arts game Virtua Fighter. At the time, WMAC seemed to have a greater opportunity to develop its approach to battle choreography and martial arts on-screen. Xena ran for six seasons and established Lucy Lawless as a stellar female action star on television. Fox has canceled WMAC Masters after two years. Where did Florentine stay?
He still had movies. In the early 2000s, before streaming overtook the home video market, the young director showed a talent for producing hits like US Seals 2, Special Forces and Undisputed 2, which caused a stir among fans of the increasingly niche action genre of the 21st century , Florentine’s films also make money; Based on 2007 sales, Undisputed 2 has earned nearly $ 10 million from home video alone.
“The main attraction is obvious, how well it makes the fight scenes,” said Outlaw Vern, a critic focusing on action cinema, who admired Florentine work early on. “His work is a great example of how the camera angle emphasizes the action and movement of the bodies in the shot, rather than just the camera trying to simulate the excitement of movement.”
Adkins jump enters a bruise in ninja: shadow of a tear. Photo: AF-Archiv / Alamy-Foto
When Florentine started his career on the fledgling B-movie market, Scott Adkins pursued his own dreams of fame in Sutton Coldfield, a working-class suburb of Birmingham, England.
Adkins was a hyperactive kid caught up in American action movies in the mid-1980s. He always wanted to practice martial arts as far as he could remember. Judo came first, which was fun but technical. He longed for the dramatic punch and kick he saw in Jean-Claude Van Dames Bloodsport (1985). Taekwondo and kickboxing finally scratched itching.
When the American Ninja of the Cannon Group came out in 1985, Adkins enrolled in the Ninja School, which appeared in England after the film’s success. “We learned self-defense techniques – a lot for the balls and things like that,” he told me.
The ninja school and the practice of current martial arts sprang from all the same aspirations. But seeing Van Damme gave the dream a form: Adkins wanted to be an action star.
After Santa had delivered him a camcorder this Christmas, Adkins began making short films with his friends in the backyard. Later, he attended drama school, but sought to balance his acting skills with those physical abilities. “When I started playing Taekwondo, I was the best kicker in the class. It came naturally to me, “Adkins said. “The acting was not so obvious, I did not have the confidence.”
Adkins still taught kickboxing at Milton Keynes when he made an appearance in the BBC crime series City Central. The appearance was enough to draw the attention of Bey Logan, an almost exclusively in the Hong Kong film business active Englishman and martial arts fan. Logan sent Adkin’s audition video to the right people to occupy him in The Accidental Spy as Jackie Chan’s bodyguard. He quickly became the “new white man in Hong Kong” and worked with Chan, Yuen Woo-ping and everyone else who plunged into the acrobatic phase of screen action. On set, he got used to the “Hong Kong Way,” where no single image was wasted and every image was considered an act. The cameramen and actors found a harmonious rhythm.
Adkins never gave up doing it in Hollywood. Like any kid who saw Schwarzenegger, Lundgren and Stallone’s large-format eyeglasses as a child, Adkins saw himself in the land of blockbusters. If anything, he thought his Hong Kong reputation would make him a broader action star, a one-man franchise ready to take on the mantle of his original idol Van Damme, whose career came to an end in the early 2000s.
Life in the shadow of these American action stars made Adkins career difficult. “Inspired by the action stars of the ’80s and then trying to start this career in the new millennium was very difficult because they did not shoot that kind of movie anymore,” he said. “But I fought on. I knew that I needed to improve as an actor. “
Little did Adkins know that he and Van Damme were on the same path: the trained hands of the hottest direct-to-video director.
Adkins and Florentine discuss the right knife in an action movie. Courtesy of Millennium Films
Don Warrener, a squat Canadian karate champion, was 50 years old when he arrived in LA to enter the movie business. One of his first stops in 1998 was the Dragonfest, an annual gathering of industry types and would-be action stars of all kinds.
“About 99% of them are darned and could not fight out of a wet paper bag, so to speak,” he said.
Hoping to meet a big producer, Warrener put on a baby blue suit and a tie with a golden dollar sign. He ran through the corridors of convention and came across Florentine, who was reading a book on Japanese karate that Warrener himself had translated. The two “Karate Bums” got along and finally decided to work together on a series of videos with martial arts instruction.
Warrener and Florentine were knee-deep in casting tapes of actors and fighters. Most of them were highlight roles of weekend warriors wriggling through semi-learned karate moves. But one thing stands out: a handsome English gentleman with BBC credits and a handful of roles in Hong Kong movies.
Warrener immediately realized the guy knew his stuff and passed the carefully packaged VHS tape to Florentine, who was impressed. That was the real deal, he thought: a guy who could fight, deliver lines, and look good. In their circles, in the midst of a sea of deluded amateurs, this was no small thing. In the middle of the night, he called Adkins in London to offer him a film role. Adkins asked if he could call tomorrow morning.
This opportunity, which would have put Adkins alongside his hero Van Damme, was missed. But the two got along and decided to work together at the next opportunity. In Special Forces (2003), Florentine occupied Adkins as a British agent, who together with a group of US special forces must take over the military leadership of a fake Eastern European dictatorship, Adkins was solid, if a little green, and Florentine offered him many opportunities to prove his abilities. In one of the final scenes of the film, Adkins, shirtless and without bleeding, annihilates his opponent with a positively ballet kick.
Adkins saw what made Florentine special. Sure, he knew how to fight, and he made sure he worked with people who knew how to fight. He had an intuitive understanding of action iconography, that wordless language spoken by Sergio Leone, John Woo, John McTiernan, Tony Scott, King Hu, Jackie Chan, Yuen Woo-ping, Lau Kar-leung, and other legends. Above all, however, Florentine prioritized the action scenes on set. In DTV productions, where there is little money available, the compromise with the territory came, but to make the most of these limits, a Zen-like organizer is required.
“In other films, action is always the first thing to cut,” Adkins said. “It’s like,” OK, we have a 100-page script and we have to tweak the whole dialogue, because that’s the story and the plot is the plot. “But Isaac is like,” No, action is king. We’re doing action movies here. “
Florentine’s mastery of the production plan stabilized countless external factors that could affect the image of a low budget. He repeatedly mentioned the number of days he spent filming each of his films, which is usually no longer than three weeks to a month.
“As a director, I’m not asking for the budget,” said Florentine. “I ask first when people come to me, how many days of shooting. Because the budget is difficult; It is a number It is important how many days of shooting there is, because action takes time. To be able to act properly, one needs the time. “
Arranging Florentine’s work ethic requires discipline. The director prefers extended shots that lead to brutal wall-to-wall battles. They take their toll on the body, even for a young and eager physical specimen. And the director’s demands are not just for the actors and stunt performers.
“He’s very hard on dealing with the (camera) operator because he has to be as skilled as the action performers to capture the choreography,” Adkins said. “Making an Isaac Florentine movie is very difficult.”
Florentine notes Antonio Banderas on the set of his 2017 film Acts of Vengeance. Courtesy of Millennium Films
Special Forces was the kind of B-movie fare that Florentine wanted to bring into play. Superficially, the film is a patriotic military adventure, but more concerned with man-to-man struggle than foreign policy. There is a serious love of action for the sake of action, which is canonical. But after wrapping up the film, the director yearned for a fresher version of modern martial arts film.
His chance came with Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2006), the successor to Walter Hill’s underrated prison boxing film. He came full of ideas into the project. For one thing, he wanted to show more mixed martial arts than straight-lined boxing. He also wanted to occupy Adkins, a 5’10 “Englishman, with Michael Jai White, a dreaded 6’1” African American with a heavy physique.
The producers were reluctant-they wanted someone bigger and more frightening, an unvarnished ass, not a handsome British-but Florentine insisted on Adkins. The character Boyka had the makings of a cult villain, a Slavic Apollo creed for our hyperviolent, imprisoned times. The trick was to pin down the details.
“I had to make him look like a monster, so I told him, ‘Do not shave yourself,'” Florentine said.
Adkins’ Russian artist then received a striking tangle and a beard, as well as a series of religious tattoos on his body.
Florentine also wanted to optimize the personality of the character. The original script had Boyka poisoned his opponent. Florentine insisted on cutting that detail down to make sure that Boyka complied with the warrior code of honor. The election formed the basis for him to become the hero of Undisputed III and the fourth post of the series, which bore his name Boyka: Undisputed.
“The evil should not be weak. He should be great, because the bigger he is, the more the audience will get excited about George Chamber (Jai White’s character). He can be bad, but not a cheater, “Florentine said.
The film was a hit with Adkins’ attitude to Boyka. To this day, when Florentine travels around the world, he meets fans of Boyka, many of whom saw the undisputed films in the cinema thanks to global distribution deals. In an Istanbul hair salon, the actor met a man who got a Boyka haircut. When searching for places in a Brazilian favela, he said he had been given permission to shoot in a dangerous area from a local gangster who worshiped Boyka. In fact, the character will soon be seen in an undisputed television series in which Florentine will direct. The production should start in early 2020 with Adkins’ Boyka in the lead role.
Adkins makes a high-flying shearing kick against Michael Jai White in Undisputed II. Photo: AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Over the next few years, Florentine and Adkins continued to work together to promote different genres with their fighting style and to attract new collaborators. Van Damme herself starred in The Shepherd (2008), a stark Mexican encounter between frontier agents and Narcos, with Adkins as Heavy. Ninja (2009) and Ninja: Shadow of a Tear (2013) competed with the undisputed series in terms of popularity and craftsmanship. Inspired by the upcoming Ninja film by Warner Bros. Ninja Assassin (2009) and the shared love of the long-dormant Ninja genre, the two developed their own attitude.
In particular, Ninja: Shadow of a Tear is the ultimate expression of their shared aesthetics: a series of nearly constant battle scenes in an expressive, almost wordless script that still respects the ancient culture that represents them. Adkins blends brutal street fighting and bar fighting with intricate stand-offs using swords, wooden sticks, knives and nunchucks. In one scene he climbs out of the machine-gun fire without a shirt on a dwelling house and sends then countless armed guards by a mixture of Dropkicks and Takedowns. He calls it the toughest movie he has ever made.
Despite the relative success of both franchises, neither Adkins nor Florentine could use them for larger projects (apart from a handful of smaller parts for Adkins, including Doctor Strange). Larger names come to Florentine to work in his empire – Antonio Banderas played the widowed husband in revenge in Acts of Vengeance in 2017 – and Adkins occasionally gets the Hollywood reputation, but more than a decade after his explosion, both of them concede this success directly -to-video has a disadvantage.
“It has a stigma, namely” Direct-to-Video “-” Oh, you’re only good enough for video. “There’s so much content today, you can not deal with Captain Marvel and expect people to watch your movie if you shoot it on a low budget,” Adkins said.
This finding has only led Adkins to focus more on selecting better projects and improving his acting skills – because the hard truth is that physical performance has an expiration date.
“28-year-old Scott Adkins was a damned beast,” he said. “When I made Undisputed II . I will not be able to outdo the guy, so for me the interest is in filmmaking, storytelling, character, acting.”
Florentine, who lives between two projects in a quiet seaside town in southern Florida, is happier to see where the chips end up. He recognizes that a career in working with companies such as Cannon and Nu Image may have limited him to the world of low-budget action, but he is confident that the same people will give him more work in the coming years.
“It used to bother me, but now I do not care,” he said as he held on to direct-to-video for the foreseeable future. “I’m grateful for what I have, I’m a very happy person, after all.”
With actors like Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise proving that action stars can reach well into middle age, Adkins has not left out the possibility of his coming out big. And he is happy to make an open plea for the opportunity to prove it.
“I want Hollywood, whoever it is, at least gives me the chance to show what I can do with a real budget and a good script.”
Alex Vuocolo is a freelance reporter and editor in New York City. He writes about genre films, local politics and transport.