There was a time in the early-to-mid 1990's when it seemed like a new direct-to-video martial arts movie was coming out every other week and the majority of these films were based around the concept of underground fighting tournaments. I truly believe BLOODSPORT is one of the most unheralded influential movies of its time. Look how many knock-offs it inspired; video store shelves were littered with titles like BLOODFIST, TO BE THE BEST, TO THE DEATH, and so forth. Most of these films were either terrible or instantly forgettable. When I saw the new DTV flick TKO on the shelf at Blockbuster and read that it was all based around an underground fighting tournament I decided to give it a shot in hopes that it would bring back some memories of those glory days of BLOODSPORT wannabes. Sure enough, TKO proved to be mostly terrible and most definitely instantly forgettable. The one thing an action flick should never be is dull.

It's a pity because TKO is a slick-looking movie - almost theatrical quality in appearance. Directed with a heavy emphasis on BET music video bling, it’s a prime example of a movie all dressed up with no place to go. Well, maybe the place it'll eventually go is to Spike TV because it sure plays like something that channel would play. Every piece of hard-pumping rock music on the soundtrack sounds perfectly suitable for a WWE wrestler's entrance music. I suppose that's fitting given the acting is straight out of WWE too.

TKO features a potentially record amount of baldness. Not sure what, if anything, that means, but the majority of the main characters sport hairless heads.

Each year a crime syndicate holds an illegal underground fighting tournament. To spice things up behind the scenes this year, the not bald crime boss decides to make it a loser-leaves-organized crime competition between the two bald guys that go around finding fighters to compete in this annual tournament. Yeah, it's an underground fighting tournament movie that's actually more about the fight promoters than the actual fighters. It's a twist but not one that makes things more interesting.

Mick, the good bald guy, is a crippled ex-fighter and bad bald guy, Martin, is a crooked cop. Bald Mick goes searching for a top fighter to represent him while having to baby-sit not bald Skyler, the gangster's whiny daughter, played by one of the most unquestionably annoying bad actresses my ears have had the displeasure of enduring in a long, long time. Bald Martin goes to prison to get a not bald fighter out of jail - a vicious psychopathic killer named "Vicious" who one-ups Mike Tyson's biting prowess, bypassing the biting of ears and going straight for the opponent's jugular.

In a related subplot, bald fighter Zendo, who looks like the lovechild of Bokeem Woodbine and Tong Po, returns from his Buddhist mountain retreat to find out which bald guy is responsible for setting his not bald brother on fire. He may be into Zen Buddhism but he's clearly not of the pacifist variety, hence his nickname of the "self-proclaimed warrior priest". Baldness eventually collides when Zendo joins up with Mick to bring down Martin by fighting the non-bald Vicious in the tournament finals.

Originally given the title URBAN ASSAULT (Wasn't that also the name of an old Sega Genesis game?), Lionsgate chose to retitle it the film TKO, a technically inaccurate title given pretty much every fight ends with death. Problem is there isn't much of that fighting until the last half hour when we finally get into the tournament and even then there's not much reason to cheer for or against any of these people. The first hour features only a scant amount of action in favor of hip-hop video visuals and endless amounts of exposition. Usually I find myself complaining that movies like this don't put enough emphasis on the writing; this time it's the exact opposite problem. The constant droning of bald men talking about the zen of fighting and loyalty and so forth was so numbing that by the time the action finally kicked in I really didn't care. TKO manages to be both very simple-minded and needlessly overwritten at the same time.

It also didn't help that the fight scenes were competently staged yet still uninspired. There’s nothing really exciting, suspenseful, or brutal about any of the fights.

Last year's UNDISPUTED 2: LAST MAN STANDING and even the utterly mindless BLOODFIST 2050 that I reviewed in last January's Foyeurism both pulled off this same kind of movie in far more entertaining fashion. I'd suggest watching either of them before bothering with TKO.

And to be honest, with the rise of UFC and mixed martial arts as a mainstream sport, to a certain extent movies of the BLOODSPORT variety are becoming obsolete.