Outside the Law (2001)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Rob Gilmer
Directed by Jorge Montesi
Starring Cynthia Rothrock, Jeff Wincott, Seamus Dever, Dan Lauria, James Lew, and Stephen Macht.

Features:

• Trailers
  

Rating: R

Anamorphic: Nope

My advice: Put Cynthia in a ring with Michelle Yeoh for the title of “Queen of Martial Arts.”

Special agent Julie Cosgrove loses her fiancee in a botched sting operation, and resolves to disappear from her dangerous government job and set up a nice peaceful existence somewhere else. Unfortunately, she decides to stop in a backwater Florida town for a while and gets caught up in the machinations of local mobsters. One of her new acquaintances ends up deceased, and suddenly she must shed her new peaceful shell and beat some ass.

Outside the Law is stock American martial arts fare. Cynthia Rothrock, whose career has always been one of those direct-to-video enigmas to me, appears as the beleaguered agent Cosgrove, flashing her karate skills in hopes that they will cover for her lack of acting talent. Alas, her kung fu is not strong enough. With a script that reads like something Chuck Norris would have wiped his ass with, there’s really not much hope from the get-go, and Rothrock’s complete lack of anything resembling range as an actor only compounds the problems.

Rothrock essentially has two emotional modes: scowling and scowling intently. Neither makes her very likeable. Her martial arts prowess is really beyond my ability to judge, but I will say that if she’s really good, it’s in a style that doesn’t film well. Her moves are slow and jerky, like someone doing tae kwon do in splints and elbow braces. All this makes for very stilted action sequences, and with none of the photogenic flashiness of Jet Li’s kung fu or Jackie Chan’s acrobatic mayhem. Maybe her style is more useful in the real world, but it doesn’t come over well on film (a problem that plagues much of Chuck Norris’ work).

The DVD is about as good as one can expect, though the video looks significantly older than it should (I originally suspected the movie dated from the late 80s or early 90s, only to discover it was much more recent). Extras are limited to trailers for better martial arts movies in the Columbia/Tri-Star stables, so that once you suffer through this one, you can see where you should reach for kung fu comfort.

At bottom, Rothrock’s dubious claim to fame as the “Queen of Martial Arts” smacks of self-promotion, and the film serves only to reinforce that belief. Michelle Yeoh could beat her ass with one hand tied behind her back. And Yeoh certainly picks better scripts. Rothrock needs to open a dojo and teach self-defense classes, and leave the filmmaking to those that don’t have to fund their own starring vehicles.