Action

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.

dir: Julius Onah

2025

I think this was meant to be a return to form, to the familiar, to the regular, for something that’s still about superheroes and people with fancy gadgets, but, you know, not too fancy. No cosmic stuff, no multiverse extravaganzas, no magic or fantasy, just military fanboy worship and noble guys giving noble speeches before smashing shit up.

And seeing as they’re trying to do Captain America movies without Chris Evans, everything has to pretty much be the same, except it has to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people, including supposed fans of the comics, won’t want to see a man of a dark skinned hue in the role. So not only does Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) have to be the military’s posterboy in all conflicts, he has to be unimpeachable and twice as sharp, yet without the benefit of the super serum that made Steve Rogers America’s Ass.

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2024

The Shadow Strays maybe is a bit of a return to form, but I have to say, I’m still a bit disappointed.

When I saw The Night Comes For Us a bunch of years ago, I thought “I’ve just watched the most awesome, most violent action film I have ever watched in my life”, and it was true, at the time. What I thought it meant was that the same director would go on making incredibly choreographed, immaculately shot violent actioners that would make the John Wick flicks look like the dull and repetitive pieces of shit that they are.

But what I was doing was limiting and pigeonholing of this director, who clearly wants to make all sorts of flicks, not just hyperkinetic homages to the Hong Kong flicks of the 80s and 90s. He wants to make horror flicks, and comedies, and variations thereof. His flick after The Night Comes For Us was called The Big 4, and, yeah, it was nothing like his earlier masterpiece of carnage. It was disappointing, to say the least.

I think the technical, film criticism term is that it was “so fucking dumb”, and it felt 14 hours long. It took me a year to finish it, an entire year. I hated it so much I couldn’t even bring myself to write a negative review of it, and I live for such opportunities. It was a cartoon, and not in a good way, because none of it was animated.

Being the simpleton that I am, however, when I heard he had a new film out, my heart skipped a beat, my hopes flew sky high, and here we are now, entertain us.

It starts off promising enough. Lots of carnage. Perversely, there’s a whole bunch of ninja like stuff where someone ploughs through a bunch of yakuza, some with swords, some with guns; all are wheat before Death’s cruel scythe. Somehow things go wrong, kinda, and the main person who was chopping up crims willy-nilly is yelled at for stuffing things up by her boss.

(범죄도시4
犯罪都市4
Beomjoedosi 4)

dir: Heo Myung-haeng

2024

Hopefully this has the dumbest title of the year until another Fast & the Furious film comes out. As far as I can tell (which isn’t very far) in Korean this flick is just called Crime City 4. This series has had a bunch of different names applied to it even as the numbering increases, so it has at times (outside of South Korea) been known as The Outlaws and also as The Roundup.

This is, therefore, the sequel to The Roundup: No Way Out, and was released, at least outside of South Korea, as The Roundup: Punishment.

I don’t know why the ludicrousness of this winds me up, but these titling issues are way more interesting than the flick, so maybe that’s why I just squandered all those words as an intro.

If you haven’t watched the earlier flicks, you are unlikely to watch this one or any future instalments based on this review, because it’s not going to be flattering or illuminating. And if you have watched the other ones, or are a fan of Korean films where the main character punches people hard enough to fling them into the 5th dimension, then you could, in theory, get some enjoyment out of this one.

When I watched the 3rd one, which, in my humble opinion, is the best one of the series thus far, I joked that these flicks are insane, and that one in particular, because it presents our hero Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok), as a man who can solve every situation, criminal or otherwise, by punching people really fucking hard. And that it was a film constructed around this concept, such that the force of his punches acted as a kind of multi-tool skeleton key that could resolve any difficulty.

I feel kind of foolish for even having written or said that, because this flick acts as a complete antidote to that previous way of thinking. It’s almost like they actually read that critique and thought “good Lord he’s absolutely right, fellows, let’s rein our bullshit in next time”. I’m not so delusional that I actually think that’s the case, but I’m miffed a bit because this flick is so dull in comparison.

The culprits in the first flick were Chinese gangs. The second flick had Koreans terrorising Koreans on holiday in Vietnam. The third flick had Koreans and Japanese crims doing nefarious shit in Korea, and this fourth flick has Koreans doing crimes and unaliving people in the Philippines. Why the Philippines? Why not the Philippines, you racist?

I really don’t know, it’s not like they spend enough time there to make it worth their while or ours. It’s just a location. They could just as easily have used Werribee or Mt Druitt instead. This flick makes the mistake of thinking we, the audience, want more plot, more technical details and less punching. Or at least I think that’s what the thinking was. Apart from a bunch of people being murderised, most of the crimes that Seok-do and his team of detectives are pursuing have to do with online casinos which is probably about the most boring fucking thing I can imagine a crime / action film to be about.