Michael Jai White and J.J. Perry Revisit “Undisputed II” at 20 — and Why Iceman Never Threw a Kick

• Michael Jai White and fight choreographer J.J. Perry spoke at a 20th-anniversary screening of “Undisputed II.”
• White kept his boxer character from kicking so the rematch had new weapons to show.
• Perry says he would now add deadman wire stops to the prison fight.

Posted: August 23, 2026

At the Undisputed II 20th-anniversary screening at Los Angeles’ Big Bad Film Festival, Michael Jai White and fight choreographer J.J. Perry revisited a fight-design argument worth remembering. Producers wanted Iceman to kick, modeled on the late boxer-kickboxer Howard Jackson. White pushed back and kept the character a pure boxer specifically so he’d have “a hill to climb having to learn to overcome this devastating MMA fighter” in Scott Adkins’ Boyka. He throws a knee, never a kick, and only adds grappling for the rematch — a structural choice that gives the choreography somewhere to go across two fights instead of front-loading every weapon in act one.

Perry backed the call on craft grounds: “Because Mike is so good at boxing, it’s easy… [it] was made by martial arts filmmakers. All of us are lifelong martial artists,” including director Isaac Florentine. Asked what he’d redo, Perry named the prison septic-system fight, where he’d now add “a couple of deadmans” — and explained the term on the record: “You put somebody on a wire that’s tied to a hard point. When they’re running at you, you hit them and it’s a hard stop. It’s almost unnatural.”

The production detail is a reminder of what location shooting costs the people in frame. The film shot at Bulgaria’s Vrasta Prison in real cold; for the scene where guards chain Iceman outside in snow, White had to hold position while crew erased their own footprints from the snow between takes of a repeated crane shot.

Source: UPI — Big Bad Film Fest: Michael Jai White nixed kicks in ‘Undisputed II’

Learn more on IMDb: Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing (2006) · J.J. Perry