"MARTIAL ARTS PIX HIT BIGTIME" screamed the across-all-columns, full-caps headline on the front page of Variety's March 23, 1981, edition, with the sub-headline noting that there were 14 "chopsockies" in production at the time, three of which were being made by major studios. Interestingly, of the three studio productions listed, only one—Forced Vengeance (1982) starring Chuck Norris, then under the title The Jade Jungle—was actually completed. The other two—a "ninja-type story" to be produced by Ted Mann and Ron Silverman at Columbia and an adaptation of Eric van Lustbader's 1980 novel The Ninja by Jaws producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown at 20th-Century Fox—never happened.

And, while not all of the nearly dozen independently produced titles listed in the article saw the light of day either, the vast majority of them did, including Force: Five, which had the distinction of being the seventh collaboration between writer/director Robert Clouse and producer Fred Weintraub, who first worked together on Enter the Dragon (1973), the U.S.-Hong Kong coproduction that made Bruce Lee an international icon and helped propel martial arts movies into the American mainstream. In the wake of Enter the Dragon's massive success, Clouse had directed a number of subsequent martial arts action films, including the Brucespolitation "classic" Game of Death (1978) and Battle Creek Brawl (1980), an early attempt to introduce Jackie Chan to American audiences that Weintraub produced (they also collaborated on 1974's Black Belt Jones and Golden Needles, 1975's The Ultimate Warrior, and 1977's The Pack).

Unfortunately, Force: Five lacked both the star power and the unique appeal of Enter the Dragon even though Clouse, who wrote the screenplay from a previous script by Emil Farkas and George Goldsmith, was clearly trying to emulate its structure, which itself was an obvious knock-off of James Bond movies and other international espionage capers. Force: Five is the very epitome of coasting on a popular wave with little incentive to innovate or be creative. As the Variety headline made clear, martial arts movies were flooding the market in the late 1970s and early '80s, and too many producers felt that, as long as they had a few good fight scenes and a semi-coherent plot, all would be well.

Like Enter the Dragon, Force: Five takes place largely on a privately owned island controlled by a nefarious villain, in this case Reverend Rhee (Master Bong Soo Han), a cult leader who specializes in attracting rich heirs and heiresses and getting them to sign over their inheritance to him. An of-the-time mash-up of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church and Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, Reverend Rhee is a sadistic, pompadoured schemer who has his own army of personally trained martial artists led by the hulking Carl (Bob Schott). In the film's opening sequence, he tortures a would-be assassin in the labyrinthine basement beneath his supposed temple, after which he releases the victim to his death at the hands (or claws, or paws, or something) of an unseen creature. (No real spoilers here, but when said creature is revealed later in the film, it is the very definition of anticlimactic, to the point of eliciting laughter.) After Reverend Rhee brainwashes a particularly wealthy heiress (Amanda Wyss) into his cult, a crack team of martial artists is quickly assembled to infiltrate the island under the guise of working for a visiting Senator (Peter MacLean), whose toothy cluelessness offers the film's only decent comic relief.

Part of the appeal of Force: Five is that it brought together on screen a group of relatively famous martial artists, although Clouse greatly underestimated how their collective lack of acting ability would hobble the film. One of the things that made Bruce Lee such a phenomenon was his mix of athletic prowess and screen presence. Lee wasn't necessarily a great actor, but he was a phenomenal performer who sold his characters with intensity and grit (hence that famous Bruce Lee face, all hard focus and determination). Working primarily as his own choreographer, Lee knew exactly how to maximize his physical abilities for the camera, which is something that appears to have evaded those working on Force: Five because, despite the fact that all the main roles are played by champion martial artists, they often look hokey and awkward on-screen. (The stunt coordinator was Pat Johnson, who had worked on virtually all of Clouse's films starting with Enter the Dragon, which makes it difficult to explain why the fights here lack impact.)

The leader is Jim Martin, a soldier-for-hire played by Joe Lewis, a four-time national karate champ and three-time international karate grand champion who trained with Bruce Lee. He quickly reassembles a team with whom he had previously worked: Lockjaw (Sonny Barnes, a California heavyweight karate champ); Billy Ortega (Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, a world full-contact welterweight champ); and Ezekial (Robert Norton, a martial arts weapons expert). Not surprisingly, none of these actors went on to substantial film careers, although Billy Ortega and Robert Norton built up decent filmographies playing side characters and choreographing stuntwork in mostly B-movies. The fifth member of the group is Laurie, the lone female. She is played by Pam Huntington, who had no martial arts experience and was clearly cast to provide some easy objectification (within 30 seconds of her character being introduced, she is disrobing, after which she takes down Lewis while wearing a barely-there negligee).

Granted, a few of the action sequences work well enough and there are some good stunts, but there is an overall sense of laziness that pervades Force: Five, as if Clouse was so assured by the abilities of his cast that he didn't need to provide much else. The plotting is slapdash, best exemplified in a prison break sequence that quickly reveals the team to have no actual plan (it does have a nice punchline in which the prisoner they are breaking free is revealed to have been living in the lap of luxury and isn't too keen to leave). Master Bong Soo Han had introduced the art of Hapkido to the U.S. in the late 1960s, which was subsequently popularized by Tom Laughlin in the Billy Jack films (1971-1977), for which Han choreographed the fight scenes. He proves to have the best screen presence of any of the characters, inflecting Reverend Rhee with a genuine sense of menace. It is too bad that one of his only major screen roles was wasted on such an anemic knock-off, which perhaps explained why he largely left the film industry and never appeared on screen again.

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