Riot opens with a montage of Christmas Eve looting that's only slightly worse than what you'll see in those "Black Friday" compilations on YouTube. British SAS officer Gary Daniels, who is stationed in the United States to train American troops, is called into action after the leader of the Third Street Crips (Dex Elliott Sanders) kidnaps a couple of white women.

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"So guys, where is your mum tonight?" Gary Daniels asks the two young children he's been babysitting on Christmas Eve. He emerges from his workout room, where he's been lifting weights and doing katas, after the kids burn pizza in his oven. Their mother, his neighbor, was supposed to be home two hours ago, but he's not worried. Traffic is bad out there. He then accepts an invitation from his Army Major pal Sugar Ray Leonard to meet him out at a bar to crush some brewskis. He tells Sugar Ray over the phone that he'll be a minute because he's babysitting his neighbor's kids. Cut to Gary and Sugar Ray sharing a pitcher, then brawling with a bunch of racist softball league dudes who blame all the rioting on black and brown people.

What happened to his neighbor? Who knows?

Riot is clearly evoking the 1992 Los Angeles riots with its scenes of looting and burning, and its use of trash-talking black villains. The casting of Sugar Ray Leonard as Daniels's black friend and the two of them beating up racists at the beginning are smokescreen for the film's racism, which depicts its antagonists as subhuman animals. They have no personalities, just aggressive tendencies. When Daniels uses one of them as a human shield, the other Crips shoot him dead without a second thought.

But don't worry, because eventually some Irish villains enter the scene. However, I found the depiction of these former IRA members about as nuanced as the film's depiction of the Crips. Also, there's a connection between the former IRA members and Daniels, and at one point one of them tells him, "We're not in Dublin now, are we," which I found curious considering that Dublin is not in Northern Ireland.

In addition to the '92 LA riots, Riot also evokes Die Hard with a sequence on the roof of a high rise involving a helicopter, and the plot point of Daniels's wife being one of the kidnapped women.

And while it certainly qualifies as a Christmas-themed action movie, it felt too post-apocalyptic to me. Everything is festooned in holiday lights, but it's all in a grimy, low-budget setting untethered from reality that's full of burning car wrecks and fires in steel drums.

Daniels can throw down with the best of them, and there are some good action sequences sprinkled throughout, with a few moments of truly impressive pyrotechnics, but I just didn't enjoy this one as much as Rage.

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