Last week I saw a huge poster of this movie in the cinema while I was buying tickets for another movie and noticed that it starred Donnie Yen. And then I saw the trailer and it confirmed my belief that this is an action comedy film. When it was announced in the social media 2 days ago that the movie would be released a day prior to Chinese New Year, I was so happy and we bought the tickets for yesterday's show. Well I will go straight to the movie now.
Brief Story Line
Fallon Zhu (Donnie Yen - Big Brother, xXx: Return of Xander Cage etc) was a police officer who was only focused on helping people and catch bad guys but was not successful in his career. Due to an incident, he broke up with his B class actress girlfriend Chloe (Niki Chow - Nothing Gold Can Stay TV series etc) and was demoted to back office duty where he gained lots of weight.
When Fallon got a special assignment to bring some guy to Tokyo, he did not realize he would be entering into a dangerous situation involving the yakuza led by their ruthless leader (Hiro Hayama - Sex and Zen 3 etc). Fallon also made new friends with Thor (Wong Jing) and his on/off girlfriend and restaurant owner (Teresa Mo - An Inspector Calls etc) in Tokyo. Despite the objection from his superior in Hong Kong PD, Fallon still try to solve the case in Japan.
So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this action comedy movie.
End of Brief Story Line
I said above that I was convinced this would be an action comedy movie. But what I did not expect was how bad the comedy really was. The humor were not funny and few times my wife and I were forced to laugh/chuckle. Not because it was hilarious but more because we thought it was weird the movie maker could think it was funny.
In this case I blame it on the director Kenji Tanikagi and Wong Jing (who served as the writer and co-director even if his name was not listed as director in the movie). I found it to be odd since Wong Jing had made numerous funny & successful Hong Kong movies. It became worse when this movie was filled with annoying characters like the interpreter (Jessica Jann) and Tokyo detective (Naoto Takenaka). Although Wong Jing was at least better as supporting role with Teresa Mo.
I personally thought Donnie Yen did nothing wrong. He was wiling to put on the "fat suit" and performed the fight scenes admirably. And there were quite a lot of scenes where he was given the opportunity to show off his skills together with Hiro Hayama as Yakuza leader. The finale fight was actually pretty awesome but sadly disturbed by the appearance of non essential characters which was more annoying & distracting then funny. Oh there were few a bit funny and interesting scenes where Fallon Zhu showing off his previous success which were taken from Donnie Yen's other movies (you might be able to recognize it if you had seen them).
To be honest my wife and I were disappointed in seeing Donnie Yen in this type of low quality movie. I could understand his wish to play character different than Ip Man, but i think he should have done better in choosing his roles. I really hope his next movies would be better.
Overall, I thought this movie was only enjoyable during the wonderfully taken fight scenes. There was nothing good in the humor and the story was a bit forced. There were few brief dramatic moments which were a little bit better than the comedy (I think it was probably due to the background songs which surprisingly were not bad). There was interesting short scene in the early part of the closing credit but no post end credit scene.
So if you are looking for great Donnie Yen films, there are quite a lot of them, but this one is definitely not one of those. If you just want to see him fight in his "fat suit" then by all means you could give this a try, but do not expect something else. Those who do not like bad action comedy movie, better avoid this. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Hopefully he redeems himself in Raging Fire. Thanks for your review, pretty much confirmed what we all thought, it wasn't going to be that great.
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