Warriors of Virtue (1997) on Netflix

PG19971h 41mAction Adventure Fantasy

Ryan Jeffers, a middle schooler with a disabled leg, longs to fit in. An initiation stunt drops him into Tao, where the warlord Komodo hunts him and kangaroo warriors guard the land.

Netflix2.9/5
IMDb4.8/103,948 votes
Rotten Tomatoes18%

Trailer

Plot summary

Ryan Jeffers, a middle school student with a disabled leg, is the waterboy for his school's football team and escapes into comic books. Ming, who owns his favorite restaurant, gives him a manuscript of Tao that sets out the five elements. That night Brad and his friends take Ryan and Chucky to a water plant for an initiation: Ryan must cross a narrow pipe to sign a graffiti wall. A spillage pipe opens and knocks him into the water. He wakes in a forest, his leg working, and meets Mudlap and then Elysia, who tells him he is in Tao. She takes him to Master Chung, where he meets Lai, Chi, Tsun and Yee, kangaroo warriors of wood, fire, earth and metal. Their leader, Yun, Warrior of Water, has left them, and the warlord Komodo, who betrayed them, hunts Ryan.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Warriors of Virtue (1997)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

The film's producers, Chinese American brothers Ron, Dennis, Christopher and Jeremy Law, were surgeons by trade and had never produced a film before; their father was a wealthy toy manufacturer in China who put up most of the reported $36 million shooting budget.
Kangaroos were chosen for the titular Warriors because their bipedal nature and inherent punches and kicks translated best to Hong Kong action cinema; the Law brothers felt no quadrupedal creature would look believable performing the film's martial arts sequences.
Dennis Law said their grandfather had named each of the Law brothers after one of the Five Classic Virtues, and that served as the impetus for what would become Warriors of Virtue.
Film critic Kale Klein of the Carlsbad Current-Argus was so physically distressed by the film that he actually vomited during the initial screenings.
The eight animatronic kangaroos that brought the Warriors to life were designed and created by Tony Gardner, who spent the first half of 1996 in China working on shots and building seven animatronic characters.
Roger Ebert voted thumbs down on the film but praised the set design by Eugenio Zanetti, writing in his review that "he made a great setting for a stupid story".
A second film, Warriors of Virtue: The Return to Tao, was released on October 22, 2002, directed by the first film's co-writer Michael Vickerman, with Kevin Smith taking his final role as the villain Dogon.