Blue Tiger (1994)

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

After watching in horror as her young son is shot and killed in an ambush by a Yakuza hit-man upon a leader of the Italian mafia, a woman named "Gina Hayes" (Virginia Madsen) sets out to track down and kill all of those responsible. To that end, after buying a gun she subsequently hires on as a waitress at a nightclub frequented by members of that specific Japanese organization. In the meantime, however, the battle between the two rival groups becomes even more heated and this creates great difficulty for everyone involved. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this initially appeared to be a polished Hollywood production which had a good cast and definitely showed some promise. Unfortunately, like so many films made during this day and age, there was a lack of realism which strained its credibility to a certain degree. Additionally, the chemistry between Virginia Madsen and Toru Nakamura (as the Yakuza assassin by the name of "Seiji") was rather tepid as well. Having said that, however, I don't believe that this was necessarily a bad film by any means and for that reason I have rated it accordingly. Average.

In this Virginia Madsen vehicle, the writing is quite bad—not unusually bad, I would hurry to add; she looks extremely cool as a vigilante.Let's face it, Virginia is a piece of fine ass—not necessarily very glamorous—but rather like your sexiest neighbor, a very sexy midwife.Here she does a nice physical role, as an action star in a very average Yakuza thriller.The cast offers one more interesting actor—daddy Stanton.You can enjoy Virginia as a tough babe—Gina Hayes. If you're, like myself, her fan, then there's no discussion—BLUE TIGER offers Virginia a lead role; otherwise, the flick sucks rather badly.The action sequences are few and stale.'Gina', Virginia's character, is a single mother set to revenge the death of her little son who was accidentally killed by a Yakuza murderer. She trains to acquire some confrontational skills, learns to handle a gun, and learns Japanese.A mention of presumable interest to a Virginia fan:--no nudity, alas; only, now and then (a shower scene, a sex scene), small portions of her breasts. Yet she is, as I said, at her very hottest, and a delight to behold.

Revenge turns nice "Gina Hayes" (Virginia Madsen) into a cold-blooded killer. In a nutshell, her son is accidentally shot. Some scumbag was aiming for another crook in a mob shootout, missed, and killed Gina's young son instead. Gina only remembers seeing a red tiger tattoo on the guy's chest. Her plan is to find this guy so she has sex with a number of them with the sole purpose of seeing if they have this tattoo.Madsen looks very hot in here but the best parts are the action scenes. Overall, it was good but so much like so many other revenge films that it got lost in the shuffle among the many of the movie of this genre in the '70s-'90s.It's still worth a look, and now that it's out on DVD I wouldn't mind seeing it again because Director Noberta Barba put some style into this film.

From the crop of "Yakusa thrillers" made in the eighties, this one is easily the best. It has it all : a great actress (Virginia Madsen of "Candyman"'s fame), a good story unfolding almost like a Greek tragedy, good direction with more than one nod to John Woo… Yes, there are shoot-outs, but not ONLY shoot-outs. In more than one aspect, this movie reminded me very much of Gans's excellent and sensuous "Crying Freeman".