HEATSEEKER was about the same as I remembered it from a previous viewing: just another American martial-arts tournament film, in which huge-muscled guys pound on each other. The story takes place in an alternate version of 2019, where the only important societal change is that massive corporations compete with one another with cyborg martial artists. I think something is said about the corporations getting better contracts if their agents win the fights, but Pyun and his co-writer don’t dilate on this matter much.
However, heroic fighter Chance O”Brien (a barely expressive Keith Cooke) scorns to have his organs messed with, and so fights cyborgs with nothing but his fists and his fury. He scores enough victories that someone decides to let him fight in the Bloodsport Tournament (or whatever it was called). To keep O’Brien from having any advantage, one of the cyborg-fighter’s manages abducts Tina, O’Brien’s trainer/girlfriend. Further, the crooked manager coerces Tina into training his best fighter, Xao (Gary Daniels). This makes for a tiny bit of drama in that O’Brien doesn’t know that Tina has only joined Xao’s team to keep O’Brien safe. But plainly real drama is not on the menu here. HEATSEEKER offers lots of hard-hitting fight-scenes, and it does so adequately, though it somewhat hurts the hero’s relatability that O’Brien, the human, seems to show emotion less well than Xao, his cyborg-opponent. Daniels may not be a good actor outside the chopsocky circuit, but he consistently showed more charisma in any of his films than did Cooke did here.
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