Matrixston Wow! Such a good movie.

Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Paul Magne Haakonsen Truth be told, then I wasn't really expecting much from this movie, and with good cause, because this movie failed to deliver anything mentionable.There aren't all that many Japanese martial arts movies about, and probably with good reason, I assume, as this movie doesn't really do the Japanese martial arts scene much justice.The story in "High Kick Girl!" ("Hai Kikku Gâru!") is almost not existing. The storyline was so weak that even a blind man could see what was failing to going on here. This was so stereotypical that is was just painful to behold. A classic tale of good having to stand up against evil in overwhelming numbers, and of course emerge triumphant. Kei Tsuchiya (played by Rina Takeda) is learning Karate, but falls in with a wrong crowd, and it is up to her sensei Yoshiaki Matsumura (played by Tatsuya Naka) to save her and bring her back on the path of virtue and righteousness.Yeah, fairly standard story here, except that there is basically no acting involved in this movie, and what little there was turned out to be stunted and rigid. And to make matters worse, then the dialogue wasn't overly impressive either. This movie is basically just fighting from start to end, and mind you, not overly great fighting or well-choreographed fighting for that matter.The good parts about the movie was that you could see the kicking actually impacted with people and it was proper kicking, but the punching was half-hearted and weak at best.Now, one thing that really irritated me in this movie, was the constant desire to show the same scene two times, with either a slightly different angle or in slow motion. What were they thinking? "Yeah, we better show the exact same scene again, in case someone just missed it?" It was frustrating and annoying, and it didn't help further the enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the movie one bit.And the final showdown scene was just straight out of the generic end of the movie workbook. Here you had one guy against a whole group of people. And of course, the good guy was dressed in white, while the bad guys were dressed in black. In stead of just rushing and surrounding the good guy, and thus taking him down by sheer force in numbers, the bad guys did the classic, stereotypical thing to do. They filed up in line and came at him one at a time in a single-file straight line; and getting beaten up one at a time, of course. And most impressively, was that once the camera panned out, these defeated people littered the entire floor all around, despite them all coming in at him in a single-filed line. Tch, tch... It was just so brilliantly stupid, that you just can't help laughing at it.It wasn't all bad though. Aside from having to watch the same scene two times in just about every single fight there was, then there were the occasional impressive fight scene or martial arts move here and there. But in overall, the movie was just a shrug of the shoulders and a shake of the head.Having seen this, I have readied myself for what's to come when I put on the "Karate Girl" ("K.G.") movie from 2011 next. Will that be just as bad as this 2009 "High Kick Girl!" movie?"High Kick Girl!" is perhaps best enjoyed as a movie you put on the day after a serious drinking binge when you are nurturing a really bad hang-over and just lay flat on the couch, putting on a movie that requires absolutely nothing from your brain to keep up with.The DVD cover said "more than just a cute high school girl... she's a master of Karate!" - yeah, I will just let that one simmer for a bit as you watch the movie and judge for yourself.

Angelus2 Rina Takada plays a girl who is relentlessly pursuing her 'Black Belt' by beating up every top fighter around her neighbourhood. Unfortunately, her challenges draw the attention of an elite group of fighters who have an old score to settle with her Sensei.As the film goes on it becomes quite boring and dull, it is the age old story of a student who goes off the rails, and then her teacher arrives to save the day...However, the film is not focused on drama, it's aim is to create a amazing fight scenes. And it succeeds to an extent.The fight scenes are very realistic and brilliantly devised as 'High Kick Girl' takes out her opponents with spinning kicks and head kicks, but the one thing that ruins a perfectly good fight scene is a 'Replay'...and this film has a lot of 'Replays'....An awful lot. Sometimes it nice to see a close up of a kick...But honestly, you'll hate it after Thirty minutes.All in all, a satisfying Karate movie.

dee.reid If you want 100% realistic fighting, then "High-Kick Girl!" is the movie for you. This is not a perfect film - what martial arts movie is? - but what gets it by is the fact that all the fights in the film, as I said before, are 100% realistic and used no wire-work or CGI (and if they did, they did a damn good job of concealing it in post-production, but I don't think that's the case here)."High-Kick Girl!" is a 100% total Karate kick-fest. It's been awhile since there have been any significant showcases for this beautiful Japanese art stateside, but this flick delivers the goods. Kei Tsuchiya (newcomer Rina Takeda) is a teenage Karate brown belt who displays some incredible fighting skills, yet her master Matsumura (Tatsuya Naka) won't promote her to the coveted black belt rank because he feels she isn't ready for it.To get her "kicks," Kei has earned a reputation on the streets as the notorious "black belt hunter," challenging the highest-ranking students at Karate dojos all over town and taking their black belts as trophies. Through a friend, Kei manages to get an audition for the Kowashiya ("Destroyer") group, a gang of martial arts-trained thugs who control much of the city's organized crime. Kei passes her test by drubbing a group of schoolgirls but is unaware that she is being used as bait to lure her master into a trap. But Kei learns too late when it turns out that the Destroyers have a grudge against Matsumura and are going to use her to draw him out of hiding."High-Kick Girl!" was co-written and directed by first-timer Fuyuhiko Nishi (from his own novel of the same name), and it's an impressive debut. He chooses to use wide-angle shots to capture all the action to give the impression to the viewer that all the fighting and acrobatic stunts are indeed real, and no CGI, wires, or camera trickery was used to enhance them. Also worth noting about the fights themselves is their authenticity: many times it looks as if Rina Takeda and company are really going at it by using full-contact fighting. When someone gets punched (or kicked) in the head, it looks and sounds like it really hurts. It definitely adds to the realism that the movie seems so desperately hard trying to achieve, especially in a genre where realism often takes a backseat to the fantastic (and damn-near impossible). (Most impressive about this particular aspect of the picture is the fact that there's no blood or outlandish gore whatsoever, despite the high-impact intensity and violence of the Karate fighting sequences. Additionally, there's no sex, nudity, or gratuitous shots up Takeda's skirt. And did I mention how strikingly attractive some of Takeda's female sparring partners are?)All of this is a plus in a genre that for a while there, seemed to be on the CGI bandwagon in the wake of "The Matrix" (1999), its sequels, and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000). One last thing is that the fights take up pretty much the entire movie. There isn't a whole lot of time wasted on character development, phony theatrics or dramatics, or unnecessary plot devices. For martial arts movie fans wanting a not-stop fight-fest, this is the movie for you.The problems arise with the uneven script and the director's choice of including slow-motion replays of all the coolest fighting sequences. This is something that hampered the enjoyment of the otherwise fantastic "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior" (2003) and Tony Jaa was wise to abandon this trend for his next feature "The Protector" (2005). The reason it's so unnecessary is because it ruins the tone of the fighting sequences and draws them out, trying the patience of the viewer. The most significant low point of the picture, however, is that Kei starts out as such a high-kicking Karate bad-ass - she's arrogant, yes, and undisciplined and has earned her bragging rights, but she's still a bad-ass - but when she is taken hostage by the Destroyers, she suddenly becomes limp, secondary, and a damsel-in-distress to Matsumura's extremely humbled and disciplined one-man army who has come to try and rescue her.I guess that even with these discrepancies, "High-Kick Girl!" still ends on a good note where Kei has learned a valuable lesson about her experiences and Karate's underlying philosophy about how real power rests in the art's katas ("forms") and not the fists (or legs, for that matter), and that patience and discipline are treasured above all else. Rina Takeda has a great future ahead of her, if she ever chooses that route. Despite her strong skills and being a strikingly attractive young woman (yeah, she's definitely a cutie, in the eyes of this poor male) - and perhaps being the first female martial arts star from Japan since Etsuko Shihomi of the "Sister Street Fighter" films in the mid-'70s - "High-Kick Girl!" is equally Tatsuya Naka's picture, since the stoic, disciplined Karate master becomes a major force in the film's second half, a sort of yin to Takeda's yang.Karate is a strikingly (no pun intended) beautiful art, which I think was perhaps the point of this movie and why the director went to such extreme lengths to showcase the fighters' abilities when duking it out on-screen. Of course, if his script had been better and the film's protagonist wasn't relegated to a secondary role in the third act, this film would have been perfect viewing for any martial arts movie fan.7/10

ebossert The greatest cinematic invention is this: A cute schoolgirl in a short skirt kicking butt. Yep, I'm a sucker for movies like this. All I ask is that there be plentiful exhibitions of well-choreographed buttkicking by cute schoolgirls. "High Kick Girl" provides a lot of this for the opening 50 minutes or so, but then takes a turn for the worse.There are a number of positives to this film. First of all, there is a ton of fighting here. I didn't actually time the length of the action sequences, but it felt like they occupied more than half of the total running time. This is a good thing. Secondly, the martial arts choreography is 100% realistic. Not one move required the use of wires, and most of the actors gave an impressive exhibition. Thirdly, the lead actress has an intimidating, arrogant persona and it's fun watching her taunt and humiliate her opponents. Fourthly, there are a handful of cute schoolgirl baddies that the protagonist battles with. Fifthly, the camera-work uses a lot of wide shots so that the viewer can see everything clearly. There are also some fairly long sequences without cuts or editing gimmicks.Unfortunately, there are a number of negatives to this film as well. The biggest problem is the rampant, undisciplined use of slow motion replays. The viewer is shown a strike at regular speed, followed by a replay of that same strike in slow motion. At first this was useful because some karate strikes are somewhat deceptive and fast, but as the film went on the slow motion just killed the fluidity of the action all together for two reasons. First, slow motion replays were shown for very basic strikes (e.g., a straight kick to the gut), which is worthless. Second, the final confrontation uses sequences that are first shown in slow motion, then replayed in SUPER slow motion. This was a major miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers because the scene just drags and drags into mind-numbing boredom. It felt like they were just padding the running time to break 80 minutes. Not good.Another problem is Rina Takeda's inexplicable turn from intimidating buttkicker to worthless wimp during the middle section. She pummels a whole school of big dudes at the beginning of the film, then goes into a shell and plays victim/hostage for most of the second half. In addition, she was fairly inactive during the finale and only took down one baddie in a not-so-awesome fight. (Tatsuya Naka takes over from there and looks impressive though.) One other thing that bothered me was that this film introduces a really cool, acrobatic schoolgirl villain near the midpoint, only to then completely forget about her for the rest of the movie. This was another terrible decision by the filmmakers that made the final fight even more disappointing because the viewer will automatically expect a throwdown between Takeda and the antagonist schoolgirl. It never happens.I disagree with anyone who claims that "High Kick Girl" is better than either one of JeeJa Yanin's films ("Chocolate" and "Raging Phoenix"). Yes, Takeda was very impressive and is a talent to look out for if she decides to do more movies, but I suspect that martial arts "purity" will be the only true reason for someone to prefer "High Kick Girl." There's more to action movies than "purity" though, and JeeJa Yanin's flicks have finale's that blow "High Kick Girl" out of the water irregardless of whether or not wires are used. In addition, the storyline to "High Kick Girl" is just as limp (if not more so) than JeeJa's movies, so there's no advantage there either. I guess the reader will just have to watch them all and make up their own mind.I would still recommend "High Kick Girl" despite its flaws. There's more than enough fun to make it worthwhile.