MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Only the Strong’ Weakened by Claptrap

“Only the Strong” is an “inspirational” youth movie, a vehicle for karate star Mark Dacascos, which suggests that America’s high schools--or at least Miami’s--are a crime-ridden chaos of disgusted teachers and buttinsky administrators, and that the streets outside are controlled by sadistic drug dealers who kill, strip cars, overact and set fire to the schools with swaggering impunity.

It also suggests that the only way out of this hell is to take the multiracial school’s 12 worst hoodlums and teach them capoeira, an obscure Brazilian martial art based on hip-rolling dance movements and practiced with a boombox on playgrounds.

Give “Only the Strong” (citywide) points for novelty: It tries hard not to be the same old kung fu claptrap. Now take away all its points, because no matter how hard it tries, it is the same old claptrap.

Once again villains sneer, swear and menace the women. Once again buddies die, authority figures go ballistic, subsidiary villains get creamed and our hero, pushed to the brink, challenges the worst heavy to a slam-bang winner-take-all brawl--this time on a moonlit beach surrounded by torch-waving thugs. Once again Might makes Right--or is it Right makes Might?

Capoeira was apparently developed by Brazilian slaves to dupe their masters into thinking they weren’t fighters but dancers. And “Only the Strong” would like us to think it’s not just more stateside chop-socky but a musical--or a social drama on school violence, “Lean on Me” with head butts. But watching the softly ingratiating Dacascos and his dirty dozen shake their booties to the capoeira, or take field trips to the Everglades, is bizarre, anachronistic: huge, sunny, cheerful images in the midst of a social firestorm.

Then there’s the villain: crack/hot-car czar Silverio. Actor Paco Christian Prieto wants to make sure that we comprehend that Silverio is scum: His fancy glowering is right in the vein of the silent-movie mustache twirlers who kept demanding the deed to the ranch and strapping down the heroines at the sawmill. When Silverio--upset that his cousin (Richard Coca) is part of the new capoeira craze--shows up to arch his eyebrows, snort and make trouble, the movie leaps from “inspiration” to inanity.

“Strong’s” director-writer (Sheldon Lettich, of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Lionheart” and “Double Impact”), co-writer (Luis Esteban), hero and villain (Dacascos and Preto) are all martial artists, and perhaps they’ve deluded themselves that cinema, like karate, consists of the same moves repeated endlessly--that the heat of battle will make it all fresh.

Not so. “Only the Strong” (rated PG-13) misses its kicks. Striving for novelty, it achieves cliche. Effortlessly.

‘Only the Strong’

Mark Dacascos: Louis Stevens

Stacey Travis: Dianna

Geoffrey Lewis: Kerrigan

Paco Christian: Prieto Silverio

A Twentieth Century Fox presentation of a Freestone Pictures/Davis Films production. Director Sheldon Lettich. Producer Samuel Hadida, Stuart S. Shapiro, Steven G. Menkin. Executive producer Victor Hadida. Screenplay by Luis Esteban, Lettich. Cinematographer Edward Pei. Editor Stephen Semel. Costumes Patricia Field. Music Harvey W. Mason. Production design J. Mark Harrington. Fight choreographers Frank Dux, Joselito (Amen) Santo. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.