Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  The little girl with leukemia, the prison guard on the take, the gang boss who needs a heart transplant, the detective reckless with his men's lives, and his man on the inside, destroyed by addiction and conflicted loyalty. All of these are literally or figuratively parts of bodies in open revolt against themselves, every system is in some way corrupted. Not that this gets weighed down by subtext...never once does it forget that bodies are also weapons, and it spares very few ways for them to smash, shred, and puncture each other, piling one bonkers setpiece on top of another, with a lithe, floating camera disrupted with quick but deliberate cuts and blisteringly fast choreography. One of the best HK action films in ages.

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 3

  not only does this machine with thousands of working parts move effortlessly, but it doesn't even seem contradictory that half of it is philosiphizing about determining the inherent value of one human life over another and the other half is guys beating each other to death because it's fun to watch. i cried over both halves for different reasons. this is also, and i mean this with absolutely no disrespect, the world's greatest advertisement for the smartphone.

  
  💔💔💔💔💔

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

  The evil that men do. Give it to Soi Cheang to make a film featuring Tony Jaa and Wu Jing, probably the two most graceful martial artists working today, to feel this ugly. As I mentioned in previous opportunities Cheang is a former horror director who went mainstream but never quite left the genre, if Motorway was a slasher film with cars, this one goes to essence of fighting scenes - the destruction of bodies - and build the film from inside it. The first hour, mostly a length set-up, gives body to this idea thematically, while the second hour just gives release to it one gorgeous shot brutal set-piece at time. Simon Yam plays a dog in one scene…

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★½ 4

  The two most physically-gifted martial arts actors of their generation (Wu Jing and Tony Jaa) vs. Zhang Jin, who was Zhang Ziyi's stunt double in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Also: Soi Cheang getting metaphysical, Simon Yam being old and tenacious and Louis Koo physically disintegrating, again. One of the top three or so martial arts films of the decade thus far.

  Coming up on the next episode of The Frances Farmer Show.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 1

  78/100

  Bone-crushing beauty evoked through gargled cuts, stabs, hits, kicks, punches, and a variety of other balletic, violent movements. Serene as fuck. Its exemplary sound design meshes and floats within the air of a world which aches with subterranean glory; subcultures and gangs and institutions fighting for the ones they love, only to dismantle their physical selves in the process. Oxygen tanks make for the best weapons.

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 2

  god-tier heroic bloodshed melodrama, probably the only time i've cried at one of these films outside of the first a better tomorrow. tona jaa is in absolute top-form here, but wu jing comes close to stealing his thunder, the cast in general is just stunning, and the action scenes have that lovely raidsploitation manic frenzy that is oh-so-enjoyable. the script to this is flawlessly tight to a fault, it's full of crazy contrivances and epic cross-cutting that make this feel like the martial arts-flavored iteration of magnolia. just a fucking riot to watch, supreme entertainment, if you're at all in-tune with hong kong filmmaking sensibilities, this is basically as good as it gets from the past decade.

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  Review by Vishwas Verma ★★★

  tony jaa

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★

  man... remember stuntwork, and filmmaking that actually highlighted it? what a time to be a

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  Review by Tao A ★★★★★ 3

  Confucius's mentor, Lao Tzu I believe his name was, once said, "When your movie ends with Tony Jaa and Wu Jing teaming up in a crazy-ass climactic battle set to Vivaldi's Summer and Mozart's Requiem against Zhang Jin and friends on the top floor of a brightly-lit Thai hospital while Louis Koo is in the very next room getting a heart transplant, you automatically get 5 stars."

  I don't think that has ever been more true than it is today.

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★½ 2

  One aspect of 2010s Hong Kong cinema that I'm particularly enjoying is the repeated and obsessive destruction and piecemeal deconstruction of Louis Koo's body. That side of him as a performer was always there (see for example Love for All Seasons or Throwdown), but the Overheard series really kicked his disintegration into high gear. Here, his lifelong organic failures drive the demented scheme of the plot, drawing together the various characters in a web of (meta)physical connections.

  Also, why did it take so long to get Tony Jaa in a Hong Kong film? He has more lines here than in all the Thai films I've seen him in put together. He can actually act, more or less.

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  Review by Evan Morgan ★★★★½ 3

  Almost as if Soi Cheang heard the concept of "heroic bloodshed" and thought someone meant it literally (the first heroic blood drive movie?)

  The fights here are aces: brutal, fast, and expressionistic, but with total clarity of movement and space. Cheang just shoots the hell out of this thing. It's easy to see what he picked up from To and company--the cavernous use of widescreen, the breathless plotting, making Louis Koo look terrible--but it's also very much a confirmation of his ascendence to the top ranks of working HK directors. And a special note of praise: he handles the globe-trotting/linguistic hopscotch demands of the Modern Chinese Co-Production™ with unrivaled dexterity.

  This was probably the most fun I've had with a new release this year. It's my Mad Max. And did I mention that Louis Koo looks terrible in this? So terrible.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 5

  "Nice tie." "Thank you."

  I saw SPL like five years ago but other than Sammo Hung looking like a Virtua Cop villain I don't remember anything about it. I'm almost positive it's not as good as this though - an operatic melodrama with action sequences so beautiful they may bring a tear to your eye. Favorite is probably the prison riot, which comes early, but it brings previously criminal amounts of deliciously orchestrated pain all the way to the end. It's tempting to hit the opera comparison too hard thanks to the Mozart and whatnot on the soundtrack, but it really does feel like a lot of magnificent effects and sequences in service of a familiar story, making stock emotional situations feel new and important (opera does that, right?).

  It's depressing to see Tony Jaa jump through CGI glass instead of the real thing, but I've already gotten over it.