Stranglehold Reviews

Professional Kickboxing Association World Kickboxing Champion Jerry "Golden Boy" Trimble petitions for his own franchise with STRANGLEHOLD, a martial-arts mixer-up filmed in Australia, judging by the accents to be heard. Ryan Cooper (Trimble) is an attache and executive gofer for Congresswoman Helen Fillmore (Jillian McWhirter), one of those closet glamour-pusses in librarian drag. As they tour the Chemco industrial plant in Malaysia, jolly PR flak Gerald Richter (Vernon Wells) goes ballistic and locks the place down with his own private army. His plan is to blow up the Chemco site and siphon off 2,000 gallons of nerve gas through a secret pipeline to a dockside tanker, all the while holding the vulnerable Congresswoman hostage. Cooper successfully eludes Richter's soldiers and hides out in the Malaysian jungle. After Richter conveys increasingly outlandish demands through a series of videotaped communiques, Cooper is forced to take matters into his own hands and leads a seasoned cadre of American fighting men back to the factory. Cooper slips into the compound, single-handedly throws a wrench into the works, and paves the way for a military onslaught. In the end, Cooper kick-boxes his way to triumph over the beefy Richter. The relatively tepid action here is generally confined to one setting, though lots of video inserts are thrown in to jazz things up. Entering the story as a glorified waterboy for the Congresswoman, and overlooked as a potential threat because of his lowly status and inscrutable demeanor, Trimble consciously emulates Steven Seagal. To underscore the reference, Richter tosses off the observation, "This guy's no clerk"--not a bad line, but one lifted shamelessly from Seagal's UNDER SIEGE. Although Trimble's heft, surfer-dude ponytail, and thousand-yard stare suggest a more viable threat than some who have been down this path before him, this guy's no Seagal. (Violence, nudity, profanity.)