Essential
Summary
The Untold Story of No Retreat No Surrender is a perfect love letter to the cult classic with entertaining interviews and insightful behind the scenes tales from the cast and crew. It’s too bad JCVD had no involvement in this otherwise amazing documentary as that would have been awesome. Aside from that this is absolute gold.
Plot: The Untold Story of No Retreat No Surrender explores the history behind the 1985 cult classic.
Review: I haven’t watched No Retreat No Surrender for a couple of years and after viewing this excellent documentary from Oliver Harper and Christopher Stratton, I will now have to revisit it.
At an hour and 50 minutes this could easily have been a slog to get through, but everyone involved is passionate and talks about the film with love, so it flies by. Scott Adkins is clearly a fan and is at his entertaining best here talking about the influence it had on him as well as the two sequels.
I found out so much about the making of this film that I never knew before like how JCVD and Kurt McKinney were meant to be in the sequel but they both turned it down due to where it was going to be filmed.
Matthis Hues talks about working on the sequel and how he had no martial arts experience beforehand; he did some training and was told he could be the next Van Damme but he wasn’t interested and wanted to do his own thing.
The doc even asks why we haven’t seen Kurt in much since and it ends up that he turned down a lot of work and then the offers stopped coming in. He did a stint on General Hospital for a few years but not much else since. It’s a shame as he had real martial arts talent and should have been the next big star.
Ross Boyask is interviewed and goes over the Bruceploitation genre as well as having his own theory about why Bruce Lee appears to Kurt’s character in No Retreat No Surrender. I didn’t know about the controversy at the time of release regarding the inclusion of the ghost of Bruce Lee; I always saw it as an homage and never meant to be offensive.
I have 2 versions on No Retreat No Surrender with one being the International cut which has the original music score; it got changed for the American release which I also didn’t know about until watching this.
My only gripe (and this isn’t against anyone involved in the production) is the lack of JCVD in the interviews. I mean, really, what else is he doing these days? He’s pretty much retired and I would have loved to have heard from him. He rarely does interviews anyway, but it would have been cool if he had contributed something to this doc.
I dare you not to tear up towards the end which totally caught me off guard; you‘ll know the moment when it happens.
Overall, The Untold Story of No Retreat No Surrender is another winner from Oliver Harper and Christopher Stratton. The interviews are entertaining and insightful while also being honest. Everyone understands the film is cheesy and flawed, but we all still love it anyway, so if you’re a fan of it then you need this doc in your collection.