While on a luxurious wine tasting tour, four best friends are taken prisoner and forced to fight each other to the death.
Kiss Kiss is the kind of film that I would have loved as a teen. With a premise that involves an opening scene that is just ten minutes of exotic dancers in their underwear dancing on a stripper pole before having to fight one another for the entertainment of others. Such a simple premise that you would think it nigh impossible, and yet the writer and director, Dallas King, has gone ahead and overbaked it.
When the main premise of your film is using a drug to turn women into obedient ass-kicking machines, one would expect to have some competent fight choreography. Unfortunately, out of the seven women that are in the cast that must fight each other, only two of them have any form of experience to pull this off; Tamra Dae being a bodybuilding athlete, and Kylie Rae being a wrestler. The rest of the cast are simply actresses, and it really shows. Attempts have been made to try and alleviate the uninspired cinematography from Jason Knutzen in the fight scenes using quick cuts in editing and unnecessary and frequent slow motion to drag out these scenes that already lack any form of impact.
If you enjoy watching catfights, then this may still appeal, but watching a film that is trying to tell me the military would be interested in this drug that turns these women into fighters...well there needs to be some competent fighting. There is an effort made by the actresses, but the physical capability is just not there. If they had managed to get some MMA fighters involved, this could have been a brilliant flick, but the most important part of the premise failed to feel genuine.
There is also an overemphasis on the antagonist's story arc. While a well-developed antagonist can help build the creedence of a film (just look at how effective Health Ledger's Joker was in elevating The Dark Knight into an instant classic), in this case, however, the performance from our main antagonist is so over-the-top that it lacks credibility. It feels more in line with a campy Austin Powers villain than a supposedly gritty and grounded slave trafficker.
The cinematography is quite nice in the opening scene, almost as if trying to replicate the John Wick style, with bright neon colours interlaced through dark shadows, though the colour grading has removed the depth to the black, which greatly reduces the impact of the contrast between the blacks and the lush neon colours. This style is quickly dropped and everything is soon bathed in a dull brown hue. The score is composed of electronic elements, which works fine, but also conflicts with the soundtrack when both play at the same time on occasion. A really odd editing choice.
Comparing Kiss Kiss to the likes of other female-oriented fighting movies like D.O.A. Dead or Alive or Raze is like comparing the Lingerie League with the American NFL. You can see how many of the decisions are based solely on the aesthetics and the quality just doesn't match. With laughable antagonists and subpar fighting choreography, Kiss Kiss was a complete letdown.