Donnie Yen has been the go-to guy for many of the recent action movies. And frankly he deserves them. It’s about time fame caught up to him but let’s hope Hollywood doesn’t swallow him up into a money-making, soulless tool like Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
This is an action movie through and through. Right from the start, the fight scenes started and never let up till the very end. And each fight scene come with great choreography, performed very impressively by all the cast members and were visually pleasing.
I’m not proud to say this but for a Chinese action movie, I was pleasantly surprised because it is so seldom that one of such genre comes along and entertained greatly.
The Japanese in this movie were portrayed so negatively it’s scary that this was a Chinese production considering how fragile the relationship between the two are. But the actors are all Japanese so that’s a good sign as all potential problems are put aside for making this movie happen.
Donnie Yen’s Wing Chun grandmaster performance was nothing short of spectacular, bringing this particular martial arts style to the silver screen. He threw his punches like Wong Fei Hong’s “no shadow kicks”. And the fight scenes were all choreographed by Samo Hung, who before this I would have doubted he was able to pull off such tight and awe-inspiring action sequenes.
The rest of the great cast include Simon Yam as the mild mannered businessman and friend, Lam Ka Tong as the translator, and Lynn Xiong as the beautiful wife of Ip. And equally to the acting chops were the Japanese counterparts led by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi.
Wilson Yip’s storytelling here was able to transport the audience into the movie and feel what the characters felt. And if a director can make the audience cared for the story and it’s characters, then it definitely is a success. This was the best collaboration between Yip and Yen.
No comments:
Post a Comment