dir: Yip Wai Sun
[img_assist|nid=757|title=Great fighter. Crap actor|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=450|height=300]
This is superficial and pointless even for a Hong Kong action flick, but damn are the fights good.
They’re too few and far between, but at the very least you can rely on Donnie Yen to deliver the goods fight-wise.
Donnie Yen is the current superstar of Hong Kong fight!-fight!-fight! fighting. He’s in the position for two reasons that I can think of that have nothing to do with acting: every other half-able fighter has moved over to Hollywood, and no-one really wants the mantle.
It’s not because of his thespian abilities, that’s for sure. And if you were wondering if Donnie is the best, have no doubt, he’ll tell you himself. The special features on DVDs of his flicks, a term devalued purely by many of the features film producers consider to be special, will often have interviews with Donnie Yen wearing sunglasses indoors and telling the camera that he is the greatest movie fighter around. Humility doth flow from this man’s every pore, yea verily.
Yes, so he’s a monumental wanker. Thing is, though, whenever I watch him fight, I forget for those few minutes all about the sheer magnitude of his wankerishness, and I marvel at just how amazing the guy is when he’s kicking the absolute shit out of some poor shmuck.
There are fights in his work history that stand out even today. His scene with Jet Li in Hero ranks as one of the most perfect fight scenes ever filmed, but you can also put that down to how it was shot, edited and the use of sound. His climactic fight scene with Jet Li in the second Once Upon a Time in China flick, or his numerous other quality moments in cinematic Asiatic time captured by camera are a testament to his abilities and his willingness to put his own body on the line, as well as the bodies of numerous poor stuntmen.
Flash Point has a cop/crime plot so generic and so formulaic that the filmmakers themselves barely bother to flesh it out with anything more than hurried clichés and perfunctory office scenes meant to look like a cop shop. Donnie’s character of Inspector Ma is given one trait, only one trait by which to define his character: he’s a cop who enjoys brutalising the criminals he arrests. The ‘suits’ have a problem with that. Ma doesn’t. Like every rebel cop who’s good at his job, Ma rejects the admonitions of his superiors and keeps beating the crap out of people until he’s relegated to looking after the police band.
The villains of the piece are a trio of Vietnamese brothers, very violent Tiger (Yu Xing), very violent Archer (Ray Liu) and the brains of the operation, violent Tony (Collin Chiu). For decades I’ve noticed that in Hong Kong flicks, if you wanted to have villains that weren’t triads but you wanted to establish that they were kill-crazy psychopaths, they’d generally be Vietnamese. The implication is that the refugees from war-torn Vietnam in the 60s and 70s would, out of desperation, become the nastiest of criminals in the HK underworld. I dunno, seems vaguely racist to me.
I could barely decipher what the hell the crime they were committing here was, and why Ma was after them, or why Ma’s former cop partner Wilson (Louis Koo) is undercover with them. It’s not because the subtitles were hard to understand, but because the dialogue is so stock standard that my ears and eyes glazed over waiting for the next fight scene. I don’t watch Donnie Yen for the one facial expression he can manage, or the wooden acting, or the humorous attempts at emotion. I watch him to see him kick the shit out of people.
And there’s nowhere near enough of that here for my money.
Louis Koo is a decent actor, who brought something special to the Johnnie To Election series of films. He does nothing in Flash Point apart from act as generically as possible. He could have been in a shampoo commercial for all you could tell from the sheer quantity of personality on display. And since Donnie is something of a personality vacuum, you have these two negatives produce an even greater acting black hole, relentlessly sucking all the oxygen out of their scenes.
The story was so unremittingly crap that it actively annoyed me, and that’s not something I generally expect from a HK action film even when I go in with the lowest of expectations.
But the fighting is well done, there’s no doubt about that. Whilst he’ll never be accused of developing his acting abilities, Donnie Yen has definitely been working on his fighting abilities. The climactic fight between himself and Collin Chou is about as good as it gets, but further on from that, to avoid just doing the same stuff as ever, Yen choreographs a lot of impressive alternate styles in with the ones we’ve always expected from him. It is a brutal, knock down drag out affair that is superbly choreographed and filmed, and makes both of them look good.
There are obvious influences from Muay Thai kickboxing, as well as a lot of grappling and holds from judo an actual wrestling, as opposed to ‘professional’ wrestling, which means, at least to me, that Donnie Yen has been getting drunk and watching a lot of cable, whereby he’s watched the superb Thai actioner Ong Bak a few dozen times, as well as the Ultimate Fighting Championship contests where guys really do beat the crap out of each other. He’s using multiple styles to show that age will not weary him, and that he’s not getting complacent. As a fighter. As an actor he's got about as much range as Woody Allen or Melanie Griffiths.
When Donnie is fighting, he is a thing of beauty, like watching a cheetah take down a gazelle, or a shark killing a gorilla. When he’s not fighting, my interest wanes, my ability to focus on what’s going on around him fades, until he starts looking like he’s going to kill someone again. Is it me, or is it Donnie? I don’t know, perhaps, despite the magnitude of love that I have for the man, I just can’t take him seriously as an actor, when in his decent stuff or in this generic cop crap. The fault is probably mine. At the very least it means that as impressed as I was with the fights, I was doubly unimpressed with the film overall, even less so than the other Donnie flick this is most often compared to, being SPL. I’m not sure whether it was really worth a trip to the Chinatown cinemas, that’s all I’m saying, even with the amazing finish.
For Donnie fans only.
6 times Donnie could punch and kick his way out of a concrete tomb, but wouldn’t be able to act his way out of a wet paper bag out of 10
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“I’m a cop. I chase robbers.” – Flash Point.
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