Kiltro is an Chilean martial arts film starring Marko Zaror, who played the villain in the exceptionally good Undisputed III: Redemption. It has an elderly dwarf in a Yoda role who is both a martial arts master and sufficiently self aware to tell the hero, “I can’t fight the villain because I’m old. And I’m a dwarf.” It has a Ben Kenobi figure who’s a broken down drunk, yet suffers no withdrawals when he repairs to the desert to train Zaror for the big showdown (Complete with an “If you can snatch the pebble from my hand” homage!). It has a pretty girl whose only function is to be rescued. It has fanciful sets, a training montage, and henchmen in makeup that’d embarrass Stardust-era Bowie. It’s terrible.
I know, right? How can such a film be terrible? Well, if a martial arts picture is dance movie with fake blood, it requires two things: rousing fight routines and an interesting protagonist to lead us from one routine to the next. Kiltro has neither.
Kiltro’s fights display some flashes of creativity, such as a “circle” fight (one in which a group of opponents circle a central fighter) that involves more than one opponent attacking at a time. However, they can’t surmount an amateurish choreography and editing that make the performers look more like enthusiastic stuntmen than martial artists. This film features no extended takes and, when we do get to see more than one kick or punch strung together, they’re blocked so poorly that we feel we could march an entire high school band through the gap between attacker and defender.
And Kiltro’s protagonist, the aforementioned Marko Zaror? We’re supposed to see him as a high-kicking Romeo dashing to the rescue of his Juliet, but he comes across as a sullen, hulking stalker with a violent streak. Kiltro wants us to root for this guy, but I only wanted to put a restraining order on him. Now, I’ll be more fair here than I was in my Thor review: the character’s whole arc is about his evolution from violent stalker to violent hero. But I couldn’t root for him at the end of the film, either. Even after he’d trained in the desert, snatched the pebble, and rescued the girl (Spoiler!), he still came across as kind of a dumb, scary dude. Zaror just didn’t have it in him to play anything else.
If you’ve read this far, I know that it’ll kill you to pass on a movie featuring a self-aware Chilean Yoda. But learn from my mistake: leave Kiltro on the rack, where it belongs.
