FlixMix takes you into the history of action movies from Hollywood to Hong Kong cinema that spans a 20-year period. This one features action scenes from 16 action-packed movies featuring action gurus, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, Jean-Claude Van Damme and many more.

It's misleading because this collection of short and generally-mediocre action scenes from mostly minor films is far from a survey of the genre, or even a highlight package of any famous action movie stars. It's not a lie though; all of the "stars" listed are actually shown in short action scene excerpts from various films, some of which you may even have heard of. Check out the IMDB full cast and crew listing to see every actor and movie featured, but even that isn't all that informative, since it just tells you what movie they got the scene from. Which is better than nothing, but since most action movies have half a dozen action sequences...

Complaints aside, the DVD does contain one action scene from 16 different movies; scenes that add up to about an hour in total length. There is a lot of padding and filler too, with "fight cards" in advance where they list the movie title and name of the characters (not the actors) who you're about to see fight. It would have improved things if they'd thrown in the name of the stunt coordinator, the stunt men/women in the fight, some info about the style of fighting used in the scene, etc. But since that would have been like... work, it's easy to see why this quick, zero-budget DVD didn't include it.

The scores.

Ultimate Fights, from the movies
Script/Story: NA
Acting/Casting: 5
Action: 8
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 4

I can't really recommend this title unless you are a huge fan of action scenes. Malaya and I are, but we still found this one pretty mediocre, for reasons I will now elaborate on.

Script/Story: NA
Since it's just a bunch of movie action scenes presented without context, there's no story to critique. I do think they could have done a better job organizing things, though. It would have been nice if they had all regular fighting first, then martial arts, then the gun battles, just to give it some sort of rising action. Or if not that, they could have ordered them by genre, or period in history, or length, or quality of the scene, or something... anything to elevate it above the utterly random order it was presented in.

Acting/Casting: 5
There's not much to rate here either, but I'm scoring this one based on the actors they chose to include, and the scenes they chose to present. A few were good, most were mediocre, and several were awful. There was also a marked lack of big name stars, and most of the scenes weren't even presented in their entirety. This disk isn't attempting to be some sort of omnibus collection of the best fight scenes in movie history, but the quality of them varied greatly, with several so bad we watched it while wondering where the hell they got this clip, when we had never heard of the movie or any of the actors in it.

Action: 8
I think I'm being somewhat generous here, but since the entire disk was action scenes...  This is definitely a sum > than the parts, since out of the 16 clips, maybe 3 or 4 were worthy of an 8 or higher score. Most of them were pretty mediocre, and a handful were just awful. By far the worst was from some 70s chick-sploitation film where two unknown actresses rolled around a locker room for maybe 30 seconds, doing nothing more than pulling each other's hair and throwing a few laughably fake punches. That scene left Malaya and me wondering if one of the women had married the producer of the DVD or what, since there was no way on earth that scene had been included on merit. 

Eye Candy: 3
This is not something I expected to score so low, but the actual technical quality of the visuals was awful. Almost every scene was dark and underexposed, as if they'd copied the scenes from a tape through a minicam to a cheap DVD writer. The weird part is that in the extras they showed short bits from several of the same fight scenes, and the image quality was great. DVD quality, compared to the dark, old-VHS quality of the main presentation. I can only assume that some technician physically screwed it up in some way, turning up the darkness or processing it incorrectly.

Fun Factor: 5
It should be fun, and some of the fights are (Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx is probably the best), but most of the fight scenes are just very mediocre. Off the top of your head you could think of a dozen better fight scenes from movies you've seen in just the last year.

Replayability: 5
Since I'd already seen more than half of the movies they took the scenes from, it was pretty much a replay for me already. This score is based on the scenes they selected, most of which were pretty mediocre. If they had great scenes, I could have scored this one a 10.