Best of the Best

Body, Mind and Spirit.
Karate, the ancient martial art and modern international sport is a contest of body, mind and spirit where often the toughest competition is against yourself. Alex Grady (Eric Roberts), an Oregon wender and widowed father of a Five-year-old son is chosen for the United States National Karate Team. He finds himself in the company of Tommy Lee (Philip Rhee), a soft-spoken Karate instructor; Travis Buckley (Christopher Penn), an urban cowboy with an attitude; Virgil Keller (John Dye), a New England Buddhist; Sonny Grasso (David Agresta), a gregarious Italian from Detroit and coach Frank Kouzo (James Earl Jones), a hardened veteran of high-powered Karate competition. It's a team with rough edges and problems that must be resolved if they're to win the international competition in Seoul, Korea. The team's corporate sponsor brings in an unorthodox trainer, Catherine Wade (Sally Kirkland), to teach the men focus their minds and bodies. During the three month training period, Wade, a stunning body trained in Eastern Philosophy as well as martial arts, tangles with Couzo over his approach to winning at all costs. What follows is a battle where each competitor attempts to defeat the opposition and become the Best of the Best.

One Of The Best Martial Arts Movies Ever Made!
The movie is about an American Karate national team who are training hard to fight the Korean Tae Kwon Do national team in Korea. The Korean team is very strong and fierce, and the American team needs to be well prepared for them. They train hard and they develop their mindset for this big challenge. The story might seem like a straightforward and simple one, however the action is quite amazing. If the viewer is into martial arts, he/she will certainly fall in love with this movie. This movie is like the martial arts version of "Rocky". Chuck Liddell said that this is one of his favorite martial arts movies, I can see why.

It's a grate movie
I enjoy this movie very much, the actors are very good, it gets a little sad at the end of the movie, when the Korean fighter comes to say how sorry he is about the other fighter brother, and offered himself as a brother to the other fighter. But all in all a very good movie.

Entertining but not exactly the best Martial Arts film
The movie is pretty typical of early 90s and follows the same formula as Rocky type movies. It's a bit Cheesy and times and the main actors (other that the Asian guy) are not really martial artists and it sort of shows. Never the less it is entertaining.

Yeah, I like it.
Well, I just found this movie again after years of thinking about it wondering if i'd ever see it again in my life. Granted, revisiting something from my youth did have some nostalgia attached to it, and perhaps it isn't as great a movie as I remembered, but it's still a 'classic' of sorts in my opinion. If I were a closet martial arts wannabe, I would find a lot of fault with this flick (as some of the '1 star review crew' have done), but I'm comfortable enough with my own ability to not have to point out every flaw with the fighting or plausability of people's performances. It was never intended as an instructional movie, so don't watch it in the hope of learning how to be the 'best of the best.' But all that aside, the movie is in my opinion well acted with a good script for this genre. The characters are well thought out; I have seen many martial arts movies where the characters are about as well thought out and as deep as the chairs that are used to break over people's heads. This movie is a little better than that, but alas it will always be a cult martial arts flick. I think it's better than any of Chuck Norris' offerings for instance, and perhaps even gives Steven Segal a run for his money when it comes to fight choreography, and the cheesiness that people seem so upset about is no more than you'd find in a late '80's movie of this genre. Worth a look at. All those 1 star reviews made me laugh about as much as the parts in this flick that make it likeable.