I’ve seen Scott Adkins kick a lot of people’s asses. Until now, I’d never seen him hack a man’s head off with a machete.

Equal parts Kickboxer and Rambo, Savage Dog is loaded to the brim with action movie staples from underground fighting, to jungle training montages, to one-man assaults on heavily fortified compounds. Set in 1959’s Indochina, Adkins plays Irish boxer and imprisoned criminal Martin Tillman. Portrayed as a post-World War II hotbed for criminal activity, the world of Savage Dog has a bit of a Sorcerer feel… desperate foreigners beyond redemption scraping out a life for themselves in a land not their own. There’s not a broad color palette at play here; the film deals strictly in black and white. Juju Chan’s Isabelle is the only good thing in this jungle; lover to Adkins’ Tillman, adopted daughter to Keith David’s Valentine, and birth daughter to Vladimir Kulich’s Steiner (an escaped Nazi). Also in the mix are action movie stars in their own rights Marko Zaror and Cung Le. All of these people are going to kill each other. And Johnson’s script does a pretty good job of clashing these characters off of one another in a well-paced way, allowing for one half of a fight film and another half of a revenge/slaughter film.

Savage Dog is exactly the kind of movie where a blood-boiling revenge seeker will say “no, not that easily” when they have a clean shot at their target who hasn’t yet suffered enough. It’s the kind of film where villains with no scruples will nonetheless put down their guns to have a good, clean fight. It’s the kind of movie where a villain will fire a machine gun at our hero, who will run just fast enough to avoid being shot. In other words… it’s exactly my kind of movie. And it knows exactly what it is. Johnson and crew know we’d RATHER see these guys fight than shoot each other, so that’s what it shows us. Are you not entertained?! If this kind of thing drives you crazy in action movies… you may want to look elsewhere for your cinematic thrills.