Last night I got the chance to see the latest Donnie Yen movie with my wife. As we both are fans of Donnie Yen, we were definitely interested in watching all his films. Especially since we did not get the seats for an interesting Indonesian movie that I originally planned to see. Anyway let us get on with the movie now.
Brief Story Line
Henry Chen Xia (Donnie Yen - Chasing the Dragon, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story etc) applied for the position of a teacher in Tak Chi high school. Despite not having the proper experience, he was accepted and given the responsibility to be the head class of 6B which was filled with the most difficult and naughty students. Five of the most challenging students were Jack (Jack Lok) the hot headed one, the twins Bruce & Chris, the tomboy girl Gladys (Gladys Li) and the Pakistani boy Gordon (Gordon Lau) who only had singing on his mind.
With the school in danger of under performance and losing their funding, Henry had to use all his unique skill sets to ensure the children were well educated and graduate with good grades. Things would not be so easy for him, since there were outsiders under the leadership of the thug Kale (Kang Yu - Ip Man 3, Iceman etc) who threatened the lifelihood of the school and the students.
So what would happen to Henry and his students? And could the school be saved? Find them all in this very interesting action drama movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Wow it was a nice experience & very refreshing seeing Donnie Yen in this kind of role. It was completely different from his previous usual characters as cool guy since he was playing a warm person, albeit with a bit mysterious background. His character here was very likable and being a teacher who had to endure the challenge of facing very naughty teenagers, I thought he performed it quite well.
A Donnie Yen movie would not be complete if it did not have any fight scenes. And even for a drama action movie, it still have quite decent fight sequences. The middle fight scene was totally awesome, and the climax fight was also quite good. However, do not expect this to be a movie filled with nonstop fight scenes, as with such plot, naturally the focus would be on the drama part, especially on Henry's efforts to educate his students. There were quite large amount of screen time for the 5 "bad" students which include their personal struggles.
From what I saw in the opening credit, I noticed that it was also produced by Donnie Yen. I guess he really wanted to do something different and at the same time provide a lot of moral messages. In the end there were plenty of those that we could grasp from this 1 hour 40 minutes movie. My wife and I had quite a wonderful moment watching this movie. Some scenes involving those students trying to pull pranks on their teacher were fun to see, while Henry's style of teaching were out of the box but we could imagine that it could be pulled off, not to mention obviously the fight sequences. There was 1 very funny scene involving the female teacher (played by Joe Chen) who had a crush on Henry. In addition to the fun moments, there were also few touching moments that my wife was also affected.
Overall as a drama action movie, I thought this one was pretty entertaining. We had quite decent laughs, some nostalgic feeling of back in high school when loyalty among friends & the hunger for acceptance felt like the most important thing we thought at that moment. Btw, the movie was classified for 17 years old in Indonesia. At first I was a bit confused since I thought this movie should be fun enough for teenagers, but then my wife highlighted that it might be due to 1 scene involving the student before the climax which might not be the best example for people of the younger age. It was also filled with few nice Mandarin and Western songs throughout the movie.
So if you are a fan of Donnie Yen and want to see him playing a different kind of character but still see him kick a$$, then this could be an option. But if you just want to see a full action movie and very violent fight sequences, then you could be less satisfied. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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