Fist Power (2000)

Fist Power (2000)
Chinese Title: 生死拳速
Translation: Life and Death Punch Speed

 

Starring: Zhao Wen-Zhuo, Anthony Wong, Gigi Lai, Sam Lee, Jewel Li, with cameos by Lau Kar-Wing, Cheng Pei-Pei, and Kara Hui Ying-Hung 
Director: Aman Chang 
Action Director: Ma Yuk-Sing 

I remember that quite a few years back, there was a TV movie that came on television that as far as I know, was based on a true story. It was a movie about a couple who took a school hostage. The man, who had a few screws loose, had a vision of a "brave, new world" and in order to "realize" this vision, got some guns and made a bomb out of household materials and sequestered a bunch of students in a classroom and...you know the drill. The movie starred Robert Urich as the hero, the school principal who's heroic act was mainly snooping around the school ineffectually. 

Well, Fist Power probably can be considered a movie in the same vein, except that the drama and tension are replaced with high-octane martial arts fighting. Actually, among the terrorist/Die Hard-clone movies, this one is actually fairly unique in the way it portrays the hostage situation. It's rather interesting. The hostage situation is more of a maguffin rather than anything else. It spurs our hero (Zhao Wen-Zhuo) into action but almost none of the set-pieces that follow are directly related to the hostage situation. That's most likely due to the fact that the film's villains are in reality not the men holding the school hostage. But, we'll get to that later. 

Rather than explain the events of the movie as they happen, I'll give you the backstory in one general summmary. A woman got pregnant by a man named Chiu who soon left her. She was then taken in by a (presumably at the time) soldier for the British army named Charles (Anthony Wong) who took care of her and her son as if it was his. After several years, the woman left Charles with her son. Now that Hong Kong belongs to China, Charles works as a truck driver. One day, the child's mother returns with Chiu, the boy's biological father. The two have officially married and they need the boy in order to get an inheritance from Chiu's father. Charles gets in an argument and the two end up taking the kid by force. 

From there, Charles goes to the police and tries to report the occurrence as a kidnapping. However, the police are unwilling to do anything about it since Charles isn't the biological father. Upset that he's being deprived of the boy, Charles decides to take things into his own hands. He gets together some of his old army buddies and they take over a classroom at a school and set up bombs around the perimeter. He demands that he see his son again before a set time and if not, he'll blow up the classroom along with everyone inside. 

Enter Brian Cheuk, a security specialist working out of Shenzhen on the Mainland. I didn't know this, but it seems that the job description of a security specialist is "go into high security buildings and test the guards' kung fu." Only in the Orient could a job be so fun to watch. Anyways, Brian in Hong Kong celebrating his birthday with his family. He discovers that the classroom that has been taken over is his nephew's classroom. Having met Charles coincidentally before, Brian tells the police this, who detain him as a suspect. 

Brian escapes with the help of a snooty reporter (Gigi Lai) and Sinma (Sam Lee), Charles' ex brother-in-law. Soon the three are in a race against time to find the boy before Charles blows up the school. 

As I was saying earlier, this whole terrorist situation is simply a macguffin. You see, this summary covers about only thirty minutes of the movie. The next hour throws all of this out the window (and any credibility that the movie may have had) in favor of non-stop action. What happens is that no sooner than Brian finds the boy, Chiu starts sending legions and legions of goons to get the boy back. I don't know if this is bad writing or what, but I find it something else when you can make a non-stop action movie about a hostage situation and still have almost no action scene regarding the terrorists themselves. 

So Chiu is the main "villain" of the movie, whereas Charles is played off as a guy not unlike Ed Harris from The Rock: an honorable man and soldier who's unable to cope with the unfair things that happen in this world and take extreme measures to find "justice." In this movie, I think we sympathize with Charles almost from the get-go and he's never established to be a bad man in any way. That's most likely why few action scenes involve Charles, because if Brian fought against him, it would make Brian look unsympathetic and Charles less of a "good guy." If you look at the The Rock, Ed Harris was sympathetic but most of the other terrorists weren't, thus justifying the many action scenes in the movie. I find it an interesting contrast. 

Unfortunately, one of the film's flaws is the direction. Director Aman Chang seems to not have a lot of style as a director. This especially shows in the scenes at the school. They're all filmed without any style whatsoever. Actually, the terrorist scenes seem almost like an afterthought, which they are, considering their importance in the movie on the whole. However, scenes that should be full of drama and suspense (i.e. Charles' initial assault on the school and his final reunion with his son) are filmed in a rather bland manner. 

Any believability that this movie has is instantly discarded after Brian goes off in search of the boy. This is evidenced in not only the over-the-top nature of the fight scenes and encounters with Chiu's goons, but in the inclusion of seemingly out-of-place slapstick humor. However, that can be easily understood when I say that Wong Jing is the film's producer. Wong Jing has produced some of the weirdest and most bizarre concoctions of slapstick comedy, strong violence, and high drama ever seen. The humor here is out of place, although it's infrequent enough to not distract too much. Thankfully, I've seen enough Hong Kong movies (and worse ones at that) that the few brief moments of slapstick didn't distract me in the least. It's not like My Father is a Hero, which took a touching and serious action film and almost spoiled it with a scene where Jet Li uses his son as a human yo-yo. 

After I watched Mahjong Dragon, I declared Zhao Wen-Zhuo to be the "King of Onscreen Stoicism." The guy was capable of being stoic under any situation in any film. He seems a lot more relaxed in this movie. He comes across as being a bit more closer to being a normal person than his previous efforts. Anthony Wong, who plays Charles, is one Hong Kong's most respected veteran actors and has been around since the late 80s/early 90s. I think the guy is most famous for a being a psychopath, although I imagine that was something akin to early career type-casting. Now he does it all: drama, comedy, action, etc. He doesn't do a bad job this time; he's just kind of there. I don't think the direction really helped all that much. 

I wanted to comment on Gigi Lai. I've seen her in two other movies: the borderline insane Kung Fu Cult Master and the stupid and pointless Legend of the Flying Swordsman. She plays a snobby reporter in this movie, much like Chingmy Yau in High Risk, another over-the-top terrorist film featuring Wong Jing's involvement. Actually, she looks like a young Chingmy Yau. However, she doesn't have the charisma that her colleague had. Nor does she share any chemistry the way Chingmy shared chemistry with Jet Li in their movies together. Actually, to draw the comparison further (and to be a lot more unfair), Chingmy beat her up early on in Kung Fu Cult Master, which pretty much sums up what I think about her. I talk so much about Chingmy because she was my favorite actress for quite a while. 

One of the characters I found really interesting was the boy's mother. She was actually quite unlikeable, but not because she was a straight-up prick. Actually, she was hypocritical money-grubbing slimeball, but she tried hard to hide it from her son. She almost always talked in soft tones and tried to put on the appearance of a caring mother, but we know all along that she's just after the money. The difference between her and Chiu is that Chiu doesn't hide it, she does. Chiu is a jerk and a crook, but he never tries to hide it. She's just false. Oh, Gigi does give her what's coming to her. 


Choreography chores were given to Ma Yuk-Sing. Ma is best known for being one of Ching Siu-Tung's protégés. If you watch Korean films like Bichunmoo (2000) and The Shadowless Sword (2005), which Ma choreographed, you can definitely see the 90s HK wuxia influence on the action. Prior to Fist Power, Ma had received critical acclaim for his work on the action-packed cop film Big Bullet, which earned him a nomination for Best Action Choreography at the Hong Kong Film Awards. His work here isn't quite as polished as Corey Yuen's Mahjong Dragon or Ching Siu-Tung's choreography in Blacksheep Affair but it gets the job done quite well. It's fast and furious and at times, quite creative. The fighting occasionally gets repetitive, but bearing in mind how much I want to see Zhao Wen-Zhuo in action and get a fair showing, I can't say that I was really disappointed. 

Zhao Wen-Zhuo is looking in fine form this time around. He had a suffered a serious injury in 1995 while making Once Upon a Time in China 5 and oftentimes injuries can limit a person's physical abilities. However, in this movie he's releasing flurries of punches, aerial kicks, and doing the splits like some Van Damme on speed. Ooh, I love it. The photography doesn't always do him justice; there are too many quick cuts at inopportune times. However, his balletic agility and high-quality booting skills are enough to give me a big smile on the face. The movie has more hand-to-hand action than Mahjong Dragon and Blacksheep Affair, although it's not quite up to the same standard. 

In a movie full of fighting, there are a couple of specific scenes that really stand out. One is a fight between Zhao and about a dozen goons armed with metal baseball bats in a mock police station. He takes them all on without breaking a sweat, using his surroundings to his advantage, and then takes on a superkicking Jewel Li. Good stuff. The finale has Zhao busting out some great kicking skills against some white guy. Also good stuff. The "second finale" is a gratuitous fight, but it's really fun. Zhao's family (played by Kung Fu legends Lau Kar-Wing, Cheng Pei-Pei, and Kara Hui Ying-Hung) shows up at the school to fight Chiu's most powerful men. Zhao bows out of this fight to let the older generation remind us why they had been so loved: Lau uses some good ol' fashioned hung gar, Cheng Pei-Pei uses some internal styles, and Kara uses some nice bootwork. It's out of place, unnecessary, but it's quite fun. 

There is one glaring flaw in the movie, especially in the fight scenes. It's the soundtrack. For a movie as fast-paced and furious as this movie is, there's no good music to compliment the action and enhance the "high-octane" feel of it all. Most of the action in the movie is accompanied by some generic jazz/saxophone music which kind of bogs down the pace rather than add to it. 

Fist Power comes across as an odd duck; it's neither as over the top as many typical Hong Kong action films nor as suspenseful and overblown as many American terrorist films. It's a rather bland film, which leaves it totally dependent on its action scenes. Let me remind that the reason I bought this movie was to be able to watch Zhao Wen-Zhuo plow through legions of bad guys like a reaper through a corn field. With that reason in mind, I was for the most part satisfied and I can say that Fist Power delivers in spades. It isn't quite the movie that I've been waiting for Zhao to make, but it's still pretty fun.