The dramatic paradigm shifts in martial arts movies can be traced to specific actors and directors.
Bruce Lee kick-started the franchise (pun intended) with 1973’s Enter the Dragon, and Jackie Chan moved the needle a decade later, with his signature blend of death-defying stunt work and comedic touches.
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| Having tracked the vicious Mr. Song to his ice factory, Navin (Joe Taslim, left) and Wang (Miao Xie) prepare to battle several dozen knife-wielding thugs. |
And now we have this jaw-dropping burst of fury from Japanese director Kenji Tanigaki and star Miao Xie, which hits the ground running — literally — and never lets up. Given that it’s available via streaming services, rabid fans of such films are guaranteed to hit PAUSE and REPLAY more than once. Frankly, I challenge them to watch the entire film without having done so.
That said, Tanigaki’s film also gets grotesquely violent, gory and — on occasion — tastelessly macabre, making it totally unsuitable for mainstream viewers or those with delicate sensibilities. Tanigaki and his writers — Tin Shu Mak, Zhilong Lei, Kwan-Sin Shum and Frank Hu — go out of their way to be gleefully outrageous at times.
They revel in it. So will folks who love this stuff.
But Tanigaki and Xie can’t take full credit. Their efforts are tightly interwoven with the equally smashing work by cinematographer Meteor Cheung, editor Chris Tonick, and fight choreographer Kenske Sonomura, along with a supporting cast of martial arts notables from Japan, China, Hong Kong and the United States.
The term “copacetic” isn’t anywhere near strong enough to applaud the collaborative result.
The setting is “somewhere in Southeast Asia.” As established during a prologue, journalist Matia Phan (JeeJa Yanin) has been investigating the disappearance of numerous children, always from poorer neighborhoods ... much to the dismay of her husband, Navin (Joe Taslim), who regards this work as dangerous.
Probing an area one her own one day, the search leads to a particularly grimy hellhole, where she’s drawn to the sound of a crying child. Alas, her rescue attempt goes horribly awry, despite her heroic effort to out-fight a gaggle of baddies.
Cut to elsewhere, some time later, as we meet Wang Wei (Xie) and his adolescent daughter, Rainy (Enyou Yang). Wang is mute, and earns a modest living as a handyman; Rainy, who is visiting, usually lives in China with her grandmother.
Brief mention is made of an unspecified “head injury” that occasionally prompts Wang to gingerly touch his scalp. (If this detail is intended to imply some sort of vulnerability, it’s apparently negligible, because it never impedes subsequent events.)
Wang’s wife, Rainy’s mother, apparently died young. The girl wants to live full-time with her father, but — all too aware of the rising danger of child trafficking — Wang insists, as they’re getting haircuts one day, that she return to China.
Hurt and angered, Rainy flees from the shop ... and is suckered into following a limping boy who claims his mother needs help. And, poof! She’s snatched, stuffed into a trash bag, and tossed into the back of an ice truck occupied by a quartet of traffickers, the most notable of whom is a bald, simple-minded man-mountain dubbed Ho (stunt man Brian Le).
Ho, we soon learn, appears impervious to pain. Nothing stops him. Le’s performance becomes amusing, in a horrifying way; we can’t help being impressed by the guy.
Wang, having followed his daughter, is just in time to see the truck depart; he starts to chase it on foot. By dashing through a building, as an improvised short cut, he catches up. Cue the first furious fracas: merely a taste of what is to come.
Sadly, Wang gets tossed from the truck, which takes off again. He follows, shedding his sandals in order to run faster.
In a film soon to be drenched in blood, no subsequent sequence is worse than the image of Wang running barefoot through streets littered with sharp rocks and broken glass, desperately refusing to slow down. That feels agonizing real.
Alas, the truck gets away.
Rapidly pivoting into a nearby police station, the frantic Wang explains the crisis via scribbled notes that also provide good descriptions of the traffickers. Sgt. Yadong (Manatsanun Phanlerdwongsakul) is sympathetic, but she’s overruled by her captain, who — obviously repulsed by Wang’s bruises and scruffy appearance — contemptuously sniffs “We have procedures here,” and walks away.
(We’ll see both of those characters again.)
Knowing the police won’t help, Wang returns home just long enough to “suit up” in a thick jacket, pants and heavy boots. He also shoves a ball peen hammer into one pocket. (I leave it to your imagination, to anticipate how that hammer will be used.) Thanks to a clue glimpsed during the truck fracas, Wang knows to seek the traffickers at a nearby bar/fight club run by Mr. Song (Sahajak Boonthanakit).
Mr. Song freezes enemies and careless underlings into large blocks of ice, preserved lovingly in his ice factory: a detail that later has a delectably gruesome payoff (a fast 10 on the “ew, yucky” meter).
By coincidence — following up on his missing wife’s efforts — Navin has arranged a meeting with Mr. Song, by posing as a fellow trafficker. Wei’s arrival blows Navin’s cover, at which point Tanigaki and Sonomura unleash the first of the film’s dog-nuts battle sequences: two lone guys against scores of baddies.
And this still is just a taste of what’s to come.
Fortunately, Navin has martial arts chops equal to Wang’s. After realizing that they have a common enemy, the two work together to trail Mr. Song and his remaining men to the ice factory, where the kidnapped children supposedly are being held.
So far, all of this remains preamble. We eventually learn that Mr. Song answers to a bigger and badder boss, briefly glimpsed during the prologue: the chillingly sociopathic Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), who works for his father-in-law and three other criminal kingpins. Paklung always is accompanied by henchman Tak (Yayan Ruhian), a scary warrior equally adept with a bow and wicked kukris (Nepalese knives).
The filmmakers toy with us mercilessly, as events proceed, offering what appear to be large or small victories, only to repeatedly smash them down with fresh defeats. Although Sonomura’s fight choreography is remarkably inventive — bodies and various loose items are put to unlikely uses — the results don’t go for the balletic grace of a Jackie Chan film. These skirmishes are down, dirty and desperate: pure kill or be killed.
And even when we appear to have hit a satisfying conclusion, a quick check of the running time reveals half an hour to go ... at which point Tanigaki and Sonomura uncork an eye-poppingly lengthy, five-way skirmish that climaxes on a late-night, rain-soaked street. Like, wow.
I can’t imagine what Tanigaki will do next ... but this film certainly will suffice until his follow-up comes along.
(Since long-time readers undoubtedly are wondering, the asterisk * in the star rating is my best effort at compromise. As a martial arts thriller, this is a 5-star masterpiece ... but the often vulgar brutality would prompt unbiased viewers to grant it 3 stars at best. Ergo, a caveat 4-star compromise.)
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