Review: Low budget modern-day martial arts films are a notoriously difficult prospect. Even more so when that low budget film is British, has no 'name' actors attached and is a tournament film. The tournament film is about as simple and straightforward as the action genre gets, and unless your film is called ENTER THE DRAGON you're in danger of disappearing into a pool of hundreds of low-budget / no plot flicks. Let's get straight to the point – UNDERGROUND is no classic. The plot is almost non-existent, the acting is shaky throughout and the low budget keeps the whole thing pretty small in scope. The surprising thing about all of this therefore is that UNDERGROUND is also a very well directed, beautifully edited film that despite all of its limitations still manages to pack a punch just a little above it's weight.

UNDERGROUND sticks to the 'rules' of the tournament movie genre like glue and never moves away from them. It's as simplified storytelling as possible - functional at best, but functional all the same. Fighters are given amusingly generic labels like 'The Soldier', 'The Triad', 'The Ex-Covict', 'The Model', 'The Instructor' and 'The Teacher'. When these names are first revealed it seems a little naff, but it's typical of UNDERGROUND's straight-to-business attitude as no time is wasted before getting on with the fight action. In the long run this actually works very well as a large group of people – twelve fighters, six gamblers and a host - are introduced clearly and quickly in order to get on with the ass-kicking - albeit with very little depth of character.

While plenty of you will be able to guess the way the film ends before you get there (I didn't), UNDERGROUND works because it makes good use of its episodic nature. Fights are set-up with nice little introductions – usually including a tidy display of skills from the fighters – before they kick off to give a taste of character in the same way that videogames often do. The fight then kicks off and when it's all over there's usually a very brief epilogue showing the losing fighter. It's a really nice touch and it manages to break each section up in a way that highlights the little differences between each character.

The low budget of UNDERGROUND means that there's no CGI trickery, and not even any noticeable wirework. The beauty of this is that UNDERGROUND relies on the skills of it's actors – several of whom (including Mark Strange, Nathan Lewis, Liang Yang and Beau Fowler) are pretty good on-screen fighters. The quality of the fights throughout UNDERGROUND do vary quite a bit depending on the fighters involved, but even those which are very average still remain pretty watchable. No fights last particularly long, but this is where the editing and structure of the film helps to keep things moving – you're never more than a few minutes from the next fight or the next result. The movement from one round to the next does become a little repetitive – but this is simply one of limitations of the tournament movie in general.