The two of them, along with Michelle Bai playing Yen’s girlfriend/colleague, also help make the normally robotic and passionless Donnie seem almost human (Yen’s been compared to Keanu Reeves, but now into his 50s the boyish air of superiority that made him such a perfect villain in his early 90s Tsui Hark films ( Once Upon a Time in China 2 and New Dragon Gate Inn) is morphing into an exasperated world-weariness.
#Fubaifu grand finale 2014 series
It might actually be unbearable if not for compelling performances from Charlie Yeung, as the head cop in charge (you know her from a series of mid-90s classics like Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels and Ashes of Time and Tsui Hark’s Love in the Time of Twilight and The Lovers), and especially Wang Baoqiang (from Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin), as the killer, who with his dead-eyed melodramatics manages to make the film’s simplistic motivations slightly believable. As with the Yip films, the action is brutally physical, aided in no small measure by CGI special effects, the impact of which is still working its way uneasily through the language of Hong Kong action cinema.Īs a character study or suspense thriller, the film doesn’t have much going for it. Donnie volunteers his services to track down the killer, but of course he knows more than he’s letting on.
#Fubaifu grand finale 2014 serial
Three years into his term, the cops are on the hunt for a serial killer, one who appears to be targeting kung fu experts. Yen plays a kung fu expert serving a prison sentence for accidentally killing a man in a duel. The two were previously paired in Chan’s 2009 period adventure film about Sun Yat-sen, Bodyguards and Assassins, but this new film is more in line with Yen’s present-day cop films SPL and Flash Point, both made with director Wilson Yip. The latest acclaimed Hong Kong film to sneak onto Seattle Screens at the AMC Pacific Place (following Johnnie To’s Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 and Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain, among other recent hits) is a new collaboration between director Teddy Chan and star/choreographer Donnie Yen.