Only the Strong

Here’s a funny story. When my wife and I first met, she was a little naive about how fake reality shows really were. I don’t think she believed me on how much staging went into them until I showed her a video where my brother’s boyfriend was on Lizard Lick Towing playing a character. So, it really shouldn’t have come to my surprise the night she was watching Iron Chef America and told me how The Chairman, was the nephew of the guy from Iron Chef Japan. Having never watched Iron Chef, I wasn’t so sure about this lineage, but I definitely knew The Chairman was Mark Dacascos, and actor I grew up watching in the 90’s. I had to hop on YouTube to prove it to her, and it’s been a running joke over the years between us.

Recently, I’ve watched some late 80’s and early 90’s action films. I’ve been revisiting some films I haven’t seen in thirty years and experiencing some of them for the first time. There is a strange comfort in watching these films, since it’s what I grew up watching with my dad. My dad loves “shoot em ups” as he calls them, and if it starred Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Stallone or Schwarzenegger, we watched it. It fueled my love for martial arts at a young age, and it’s a shame I haven’t spent more time with the genre over the years.

Saturday night, I found myself watching 1997’s Drive, a film starring Mark Dacascos and Brittney Murphy that I always wanted to watch, but just never got around to renting. It wasn’t the greatest film in the world, but it satisfied me for ninety minutes, and it left me wanting to watch something else with Dacascos, but of higher quality. So, I went hunting for one of my favorite movies that I watched dozens of times on cable, Only the Strong.

Of course, Only the Strong wasn’t streaming nor was it available for purchase. It was never released on Blu-ray, so as I prepared to purchase the DVD off of eBay, I suddenly thought of checking YouTube. Thankfully, I found a copy on YouTube to watch, and I really enjoyed my time re-visiting the movie.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s a unique film in that the story is not all that original, but the martial art featured is. The plot is one of the “teacher savior”, you know like Lean on Me or Dangerous Minds. A young solider (Mark Dacascos) makes his way back to the high school he graduated from to find it’s turned violent, and the teachers have all but given up on the students. After stopping an attack on a student, which gets the school’s attention, the solider is given an experimental class of the worst twelve students to teach an Afro-Brazilian martial art called capoeira.

The story is predictable and reeks quite a bit of 90’s cheese and optimism, but it’s a fun watch. Mark Dascascos is amazing in his role as Louis Stevens, and his martial arts and gymnastic background really make the fight scenes hard to forget. Capoeira is a mixture of dance and martial arts, featuring lots of kicks and is really unlike anything else you’ve seen in movies (although capoeira has made appearances in a few other films and video games since Only the Strong).

Something I noticed for the first time during this watch was the use of the song that was used in Mazda’s marketing in the early 2000’s, remember the “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom?” I had a Miata during this time and as much as I hate to admit it, I had picked up the nickname Zoom Zoom for a few years there.

After the credits began to roll on Only the Strong, I wanted to learn more. Thankfully, I found this great interview on YouTube from VikingSamurai with Mark Dacascos discussing the film. There is also an interview with the capoeira trainer/actor, the writer, and the director, but I haven’t gotten around to them yet. However, if they are nearly as informative and interesting as Mark’s stories, then I’m in for a treat.

Only the Strong is not a film you’ll hear about often, and it’s not easily accessible these days, but for fans of 90’s action films, it’s worth a watch as long as you go in knowing what to expect. It’s a shame the film was a victim of studio politics, because it really should have made Mark Dacascos a much bigger star.