If you’ve ever wanted to watch Enter the Dragon get mugged in a K-Mart parking lot by a half-baked blaxploitation flick with identity issues, look no further than The Dynamite Brothers. This is Al Adamson’s idea of East-meets-West, but instead of a cultural fusion, you get a cinematic fender bender—a kung fu buddy movie duct-taped to a crime caper, with all the precision of a drunk surgeon in a wind tunnel.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: The Dynamite Brothers is bad. Not charmingly bad. Not midnight-movie-bad. Just 88 minutes of “who let this happen?” with a synth soundtrack that feels like it was composed on a microwave. It’s the kind of film where every punch lands like a wet slap and every plot point collapses like a folding chair under a sumo wrestler.
We open with Alan Tang’s character, Larry Chin, being smuggled into Los Angeles from Hong Kong in a shipping container like some kind of chop-socky contraband. He escapes. Why? Who knows. How? Barely explained. He’s here to find his missing brother, which is the film’s excuse for its plot, but that mystery is so thin it could be printed on rice paper.
Larry runs into Stud Brown (yes, that’s the character’s name, and yes, they say it with a straight face), played by NFL-turned-actor Timothy Brown, a jive-talking, kung-fu-kicking ex-con who clearly wandered onto the set thinking this was an audition for Shaft 3: Shaftier. Together, they form the most reluctant and uncoordinated duo since socks and sandals.
The chemistry between Tang and Brown is nonexistent. They speak like two people recording dialogue for separate movies in different rooms, possibly in different decades. Tang’s English is serviceable, but every line feels like it was memorized phonetically off a cocktail napkin. Brown, on the other hand, delivers his lines like he’s being paid per syllable—slow, halting, and full of artificial funk.
The action? If you squint and turn your head sideways, you might mistake it for choreography. Otherwise, it’s a geriatric ballet of soft kicks, pulled punches, and people falling over like they tripped on their own dignity. Fights are filmed with all the tension of a nap, and most seem to end because someone forgot the choreography halfway through. There’s no rhythm, no build-up—just guys in bell bottoms flailing around like backup dancers at a failed kung fu disco.
Now let’s talk villains. There’s a racist cop. A Chinatown crime boss. Some white dudes with suits and sideburns. They blend together like moldy bread: indistinguishable, unpleasant, and vaguely dangerous if left unattended. None of them pose a real threat, unless your biggest fear in life is being stared at intensely while bad jazz plays in the background.
The film jumps from scene to scene like a frog on a hotplate. Larry and Stud go from shootouts to fistfights to quiet conversations about honor and family, and none of it flows. It’s like Adamson shot the scenes in whatever order the actors showed up and hoped it would come together in editing. Spoiler: it didn’t.
Somewhere around the halfway mark, you realize The Dynamite Brothers doesn’t really care what it is. Is it a martial arts movie? A blaxploitation film? A cop thriller? A family drama? A revenge flick? The answer is yes. And also no. It’s all of them, and none of them—an identity crisis shot on 16mm with a bucket of red paint and a case of Narragansett beer.
Let’s not ignore the cinematography, which looks like someone dipped a camera lens in Vaseline and aimed it at random. Night scenes are darker than a blackout in a cave. Day scenes are washed out like a faded Polaroid. The camera pans as if it’s being dragged by a mule with a limp. And the zooms—oh God, the zooms—are so aggressive they might trigger vertigo.
The editing is worse. Smash cuts, random transitions, and continuity errors so blatant they feel intentional. In one scene, a character’s shirt changes color mid-conversation. In another, a man gets shot, falls over, and is miraculously alive in the next frame, smiling like it’s casual Friday.
By the third act, Larry finds his brother, who is somehow both alive and irrelevant, and there’s a big shootout involving every side character the film could afford to pay in sandwiches. People die. Stud makes a dumb joke. Larry stares off into the middle distance like he’s trying to remember how he got here. Then the credits roll, leaving you with the same feeling you get after eating gas station sushi: regret, confusion, and the need to reevaluate your life choices.
Final Thoughts:
The Dynamite Brothers is like a mixtape made by someone who only owns three records and a broken blender. It wants to be Rush Hour before Rush Hour, but lands somewhere between Plan 9 from Outer Space and a kung fu instructional video filmed in a garage. The acting is stiff, the pacing is brutal, and the dialogue is so wooden it might give you splinters.
If you’re into watching genre cinema cannibalize itself while wearing platform shoes and a fake mustache, this is your movie. Otherwise, skip it. Watch Black Belt Jones. Watch Fists of Fury. Hell, watch The Love Boat reruns—they probably have better martial arts and tighter story arcs.
As far as Al Adamson films go, this is one of his more ambitious disasters. But ambition, like kung fu, only matters if you know what the hell you’re doing. And here? Nobody does.
File under: “The only dynamite here is in the title—and even that’s a dud.”
