Lethal Combat: Techno Warriors 2 | aka Digital Warriors (2000) Review

“Lethal Combat: Techno Warriors 2” Filipino Poster

AKA: Digital Warriors 
Director: Philip Ko Fei
Cast: Darren Shahlavi, Lee Kwang-su, Yukari Oshima, Zoren Legaspi, Jimmy Ko, Man-Kei Lin, James Jim-Si Ha, Philip Ko Fei, Winston Ellis, Thorsten Nickel
Running Time: 93 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Let’s address the elephant in the room – I’m convinced nobody was clamouring for a sequel to the 1997 sci-fi action mashup Techno Warriors. Philip Ko Fei’s incomprehensible Philippines shot action flick gave us a dystopian future (set in 2020!), where a villain called the Black Ninja escapes from the Cyber World into the real world, and cops from both worlds team up to stand a chance of taking him down. What Techno Warriors lacked in narrative cohesion it did make up for in its energetic pacing and high kicking action sequences, so much of which were shot Ko Fei decided to make a follow-up, ensuring the scenes that were left on the cutting room floor didn’t go to waste. The result would come 3 years later in the form of Lethal Combat: Techno Warriors 2 (or as it was released in some territories, Digital Warriors).

In my review for Techno Warriors I complained that “Explaining the plot…could easily be described as headache inducing”, however compared to Lethal Combat I can safely take that back, as almost nothing make sense from the first scene. Essentially a thematic sequel rather than a direct continuation (even though characters names remain the same, and scenes from Techno Warriors are frequently shown in flashback, albeit in a different context to how they first appeared!), Lethal Combat opens with returning cops Darren Shahlavi and Lee Kwang-su. Neither Tamara Guo or Monsour Del Rosario (despite him being listed on both the HKMDB and IMDB sites!) return this time around, replaced by Yukari Oshima (naturally billed by her Filipino alias of Cynthia Luster, in what would be her final role until a one-off return in 2011’s Legendary Amazons) and Zoren Legaspi (a stalwart of 90’s Filipino action flicks like Shotgun Bajo).

After an opening warehouse shootout against some villainous computer game developers who are secretly smuggling uranium (why we never find out, and it’s never mentioned again), Shahlavi and Kwang-su are killed in a hail of bullets, with Legaspi turning up to already find them dead. Harrowing stuff, so naturally he attends a press conference to discuss their deaths in the next scene wearing a brightly coloured tie adorned with images of Marilyn Monroe. Legaspi’s girlfriend is a game developer working for Banana Computers (even though she’s clearly using a Mac), and as a homage to her boyfriends fallen comrades, she scans the images of Shahlavi and Kwang-su to turn them into ‘Digital Warriors’, who’ll be the main characters in her new game.

However it turns out game developing is a dangerous profession, as Bill Gates (I kid you not) from Mango Computers has called a secret meeting of Asia’s top game developers. He wants to make a game that’ll surpass Streetfighter which should contain “Asian characteristics” to appeal to China’s massive population, and he’s willing to pay big bucks for anyone who can help him succeed. Banana Computers look set to impress the most, however they have heavy competition from the devious Durian Computers, and there’s also internal strife with a rival developer (played by a Filipino actor who isn’t listed anywhere, possibly because he manages to being even more annoying than Niño Muhlach in Techno Warriors). When the rival developer seizes the chance to hijack the game, he inadvertently releases the games villain (you guessed it – the Black Ninja) into the real world, and soon Shahlavi and Kwang-su follow suit.

I confess I’m an unashamed fan of Philip Ko Fei, I mean one look at his filmography and you can see he’s a guy who’s done it all. From being the villain in countless 70’s kung-fu flicks whose presence immediately elevated any production he was in, to choreographing the ninja action in many of Godfrey Ho’s cut ‘n’ paste efforts in the 80’s, to directing a whole bunch of Philippines shot action cheapies in the 90’s. Unfortunately despite his time working with Godfrey Ho, it’s clear that Ko didn’t pick up too many tips on how to put together an effective cut ‘n’ paste job, as in Lethal Combat the leftover scenes from Techno Warriors rarely gel with the newly shot scenes of Yukari Oshima and Zoren Legaspi.

I get the distinct impression nobody really knew what they were doing during the production of Lethal Combat, with any attempt at plot cohesiveness left to the awful dub, and Oshima and Legaspi spending an inordinate amount of time looking listless while staring at a computer screen. There are a number of dialogue scenes which play out as one shot but have bizarre and awkwardly placed long pauses, almost as if another scene was supposed to be intercut before going back to them, but the editor just gave up and walked away. Other attempts at plot logic are simply abandoned all together, like when the characters do escape into the real world, but then in a latter scene Oshima and co. are still watching the action play out on the computer screen. Aren’t they supposed to be in the real world now? I have a feeling the expected audience for Lethal Combat likely wasn’t expected to be anyone beyond the crew’s family and friends.

Speaking of the awful dub, it at least comes with plenty of unintentional hilarity. These Filipino shot productions were notoriously low budget, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if the dubbers were also purchased on the cheap, and they simply decided to see how much they could get away with. Most of the clangers are given to Ko Fei’s Black Ninja, who at least gets to show his face this time around (perhaps that’s why Lethal Combat exists?). During his fight with Shahlavi he quips “you have a cute butt, you should join our side!”, and after finally defeating him announces “How’d you like them apples? I suggest you surrender now and call me master!” Other times a character combines the Adidas and Nike slogans by proclaiming “Impossible is nothing, just do it!”, and we even get a villain named after the popular Filipino beer Red Horse.

If anything is a plus, Ko Fei does get a lot more to do on the action front this time around, with the presumably unused Techno Warriors finale pitting him against Shahlavi and Kwang-su here re-purposed into the plot, giving us the opportunity to witness that he still had the moves at almost 50. The most interesting addition to Lethal Combat is the inclusion of an uncredited Thorsten Nickel, the German martial artist most well known for being cast as the bad guy in the Jackie Chan starring Thunderbolt, in which he was given precisely zero fight scenes. Here at least we get to see that he can actually fight, although it’d be easier to theorise around why his talents weren’t utilised in Thunderbolt than it would be for me to try and explain what his role is.

The biggest issue in Lethal Combat though (and all of them are pretty big) is that it’s clear all of the best fight scenes were used in Techno Warriors. Here we’re left with the “wasn’t quite good enough” reel, which when you consider it’s from a movie which was already low budget, is never going to be good news. It’ll always be a pleasure to watch Shahlavi unleash his kicks, however there’s no real standout moments on display, and when you also lose the frantic pace that Techno Warriors came with, it’s not helped by the fact most of the surrounding scenes around the fights become increasingly dull as the plot progresses. Criminally Yukari Oshima is hardly used at all, and as the one person capable of elevating even the lowest budget production, to see her relegated largely to the side-lines perhaps makes it a small mercy that this would be the last movie she’d appear in during the 2000’s.

Ko Fei would go on to direct a further 18 movies between 2000 to 2003 until his retirement from behind the camera (he’d act intermittently in the succeeding years), so it’s not a surprise with such a quantity over quality approach that Lethal Combat ended up as an unwatchable mess. Perhaps the best way to approach a viewing is as a collection of deleted scenes, with fast forwardable filler inbetween.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 3/10

Note: Since there’s almost no trace of Lethal Combat’s existence anywhere, here’s the full movie, but dubbed in Tamil. We apologize.