Hot Potato by Oscar Williams (Review)
I’m going to save you a lot of grief. If you’re ever tempted to watch Hot Potato, simply fast forward about 90 minutes or so to the end credits. There, you can watch a condensed version of the movie. This means a lame martial arts sequence followed by some posturing followed by some elephants wrecking a tropical fortress followed by another lame fight, and finally, a few glamor shots of the main actors. Of course, this means you won’t get any clue as to the movie’s plot, nor hear any of the dialog. But it’s better this way. Trust me.
Hot Potato gets right to the point: the beautiful daughter of an American senator is captured by the ruthless Rangoon, though why she’s gallivanting about a small Asian country is anyone’s guess. It seems the senator is pushing for some sort of foreign aid, which Rangoon objects to. No foreign aid means war, but I guess that’s the sort of thing ruthless Asian crimelords typically enjoy. In response, the U.S. sends in their very best, Black Belt Jones and his sidekick, Chicago. (I’m not making this up people.)
Now, let’s suppose that you’re called upon to rescue the daughter of an American senator from the clutches of a despot. What would be the first thing you’d do? Assemble a group of specially trained commandoes well-versed in jungle warfare? Build up a cache of sophisticated weaponry that will obliterate your enemies? Or go to a brothel and get the fattest, sweatiest man you can find, whose primary skills include eating, bickering, and stuffing food into his clothes? Well, the choice is obvious, isn’t it? And did I forget to mention that this particular operative’s name is Rhino, and that he’ll spend the rest of the movie in a poncho, knee-high socks, and sweat-drenched pants. I did? Well, how silly of me.
Jones and his “highly trained” crew then set off on their grand adventure. Their first stop, the fortress where Rangoon is hiding the senator’s daughter. Or is the daughter really a clever lookalike planted there to throw off our heroes? Well, it can’t be the latter. Think about it; what are the odds of finding a woman who looks just like the senator’s daughter in a backwoods bar in Asia? But the improbability doesn’t stop there. How do our heroes plan on attacking this fortress? Under cover of night, with ninjas and big explosions? Nope. With elephants. That’s right, our group barges in on the backs of pachyderms. Hey, it worked for Hannibal, right? And their brilliant decoy? A windup toy police car, complete with working siren. Now that I think about it, though, I guess if I saw a toy car towed across the ground by a string, the last thing I’d be expecting is an elephant crashing through the wall.
Don’t worry, though. The inanity has just begun. Seems our lookalike has also stolen some incriminating documents from Rangoon that prove his duplicitous nature. And if the other local baddies find out about this, Rangoon will be in hot water. So Rangoon attacks our crew with an assortment of legions. Of course, none are effective. But how can they hope to stand the assault our heroes unleash? How can scantily clad natives hope to fight the likes of firecrackers, bomb-dropping kites, and a bottle rocket gatling gun that’d make MacGyver envious? Remember that old Disney movie, Swiss Family Robinson, where they fought off those pirates with coconut grenades? Well, it’s kind of like that, but with really lame martial arts thrown in.
Eventually, they make it to Rangoon’s fortress and all hell breaks loose. Well maybe not all hell. More like two or three percent of it. Black Belt Jones unleashes his furious brand of mediocre karate, Rhino dances and cavorts in the most nauseating ways imaginable, and Rangoon gets fed to his pet tigers. Oh, and Jones ends up with the girl. Like there was any doubt about that. Unfortunately, I don’t think Belt did anything in the movie that earned him the right to get his freak on.
How can this movie be considered the followup to Black Belt Jones? Admittedly, Black Belt Jones was a bad movie, but it had so much confidence in it’s bad ass-ness that it didn’t matter. Hot Potato is a bad movie, and that’s all. Even when Belt gets his freak on, it’s lame. Where’s the misogyny that I knew and loved in Black Belt Jones, the male bravado, the witty one-liners? Where’s the rapping drug dealer, the panty throwing, the funky threads? Trust me… just pop in the tape and fast forward to the end. While the credits roll, make up your own plot and dialog. I guarantee that the result will be far more entertaining than anything that’s really in the movie.