Blood And Bone might just be his masterpiece. An underground fighting movie with starring Michael Jai White kicking the hell out of people should be a simple enough proposition. His flying kicks are incredible, and he seems to be able to defy gravity without breaking a sweat. At one point he manages to kick four guys in the face before he hits the ground, and I’m not even sure how that’s physically possible. White looks so cool doing it, he’s got the swagger of young Bruce Lee or even Mel Gibson about him. Throw in a cast on notable MMA fighters and wrestlers – including Gina Carano, YouTube street brawler Kimbo Slice and The Wrestler’s Ernest ‘The Cat’ Miller – and just watching White destroying dudes for 90 minutes would easily be enough.

Yet what really makes the film so great is that it has one of the most nuanced, interesting bad guys I’ve ever seen in a straight-up genre film. Islington-born Eamon Walker plays the top street fighting promoter that killed Michael Jai White’s mate and who he’s trying to get revenge on. It seems like he’s going to be the big bad who White kills in the final reel. But that’s not how it plays out. Half way through the film, White defeats Walker’s champ – a feat that you’d expect him to achieve at the end, if it was following the standard fight tournament structure.

But instead, Walker takes White under his wing, and reveals that he wants to use him to break into a an elite international underground fighting circuit run by mega-rich white guys. Walker is revealed to be far from a simple 2D bad guy. He’s someone who believes he was born at the bottom of the food chain, and since no one is ever going to help him, it is perfectly acceptable for him to do anything he has to in order to get by. He idolises Genghis Khan and actively tries to distance himself from the average street thug – he prides himself on not drinking, smoking or using profanity, yet thinks nothing of kidnapping White’s dead buddy‘s wife and turning her into a junkie. In one telling scene he looks out at the urban streets and laments, “All of that is mine… It all so dark and unsophisticated. It is not where I want to be any more.”

It’s a tremendous performance from Walker – a black British actor who much like Idris Elba had to move into American cable television to get his big break (in HBO prison drama Oz). There’s a particularly brilliant scene late on where Walker sets up a match with his contact in the international fight ring, played by a hammy Julian Sands. Sands is a callous, condescending racist, and Walker is clearly disgusted with him, yet he is still desperate to jump into bed with him. Sands asks him why he’d want to hang around with a load of “stuffy old white guys” – Walker replies that it’s the same reason Sands does, the power and the connections. Instead of storming out when Sands compares African Americans to pitbulls, he swallows his pride and plays up to his stereotypes, because he believes it is more important to get ahead in the game than to win the moral victory. Walker is excellent is this scene, seething with both anger and shame throughout.

So yeah, Blood And Bone is a far more interesting film than you might think, and a great example of the undiscovered gems that lie in the DTV market. Plus it has Michael Jai White destroying Kimbo Slice in a prison brawl at the beginning.