Invincible Dragon (2019)

Invincible Dragon (2019)
aka: The Man from Kowloon; Kowloon Unbeaten; Dragon Tattoo; Made in Kowloon; The Man with  the Dragon Tattoo
Chinese Title: 九龍不敗
Translation: Kowloon Unbeaten

 

Starring: Max Zhang, Anderson Silva, Annie Liu, Stephy Tang, Kevin Cheng, Lam Suet, Richard Ng, Loletta Lee
Director: Fruit Chan
Action Directors: Stephen Tung Wei, Jack Wong

Conversations about the death of Hong Kong film are a dime a dozen these days. Most people at this point agree that it's dead and will most likely be absorbed (or overcome completely) by Mainland Chinese films. I've always gauged the health of HK cinema by its action output, both in quantity and quality. 2019 was an especially depressing year, with this and Ip Man 4 being the only real martial arts films produced in Hong Kong, and only one of those got nominated for the Best Action Choreography award! Imagine the dismay that Max Zhang must've felt when he put in his all to give a strong physical performance in this film, and then loses out to not one, not two, but three movies starring Louis Koo! But even Max Zhang's martial prowess is ultimately overshadowed by a surprising degree of ineptness, for which only director Fruit Chan can bear the blame.

Max Zhang plays Inspector Kowloon, an undercover cop trying to bust a crime kingpin (Lam Suet). He does, but then makes the really, really stupid mistake of botching the arrest by the shooting off the guy's arm...in public...after already having pinned him down!!! What the hell!!?? Anyway, Kowloon is reassigned to another district, which soon becomes the hotbed for a series of serial murders. In this case, it seems as though the killer is targeting policewomen. In a sting meant to trick the killer into attacking another policewoman (former Category III starlet Loletta Lee!), the killer instead kills one of the commanding officers and disappears with Kowloon's fiancée (Stephy Tang).

Five years later, Kowloon has left the force and is now an out-of-shape bum eking out a living in illegal MMA matches. The killer seems to have stopped, until the body of a policewoman shows up in Macau. Another policeman is assigned to the case, but he quickly determines that only Kowloon has the smarts (and drive) to do it. They trace the murders back to Alexander Sinclair (Brazilian MMA fighter Anderson Silva), a former US marine and cage fighter, who had once fought in the ring against Kowloon in a friendly match. The movie never makes it a secret who the killer is, but does play coy with his motive. Unfortunately, Fruit Chan botches that by placing a scene where Sinclair has a flashback that explains his motives right before the scene where Kowloon and the other cops deduce the same motives through other means. It's redudant and doesn't make them look as competent to the audience.

Of course, if making a police thriller about a serial killer in which we both know his identity from the outset and find out his motives into two repetitive scenes were the only flaws, I'd be better disposed toward it. But Fruit Chan isn't content to misstep just there, and dutifully finds other ways to jump the shark. One big mistake is casting Anderson Silva as an American and then asking him to act in English. Needless to say, his performance is stilted at best. At one point, he does speak Portuguese as a code language to his wife (Juju Chan), which I assume she knows because she's a Macau native. Max Zhang plays his character with the usual brooding cop persona, much like he did in The Brink. That's fine for what it is, but then he overacts a storm and goes completely over the top during the climax, and I had to ask myself just what the heck movie this performance was imported from.

Talking about importing things from other movies (from other genres), the big elephant in the room to anyone who has seen this is undoubtedly the capper to the climax, in which the deus ex machina seems to have been stolen via an interdimensional portal from Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, bad CGI and all. As a result, the entire films plays like a rehash of Benny Chan's Divergence, but with better fights and scenes stolen from D-War.

Better fights than Divergence? Does that mean that they are good? Sort of. Stephen Tung and Jack Wong have both done some good work here and there, like Hitman and Shamo, respectively. The action in the first hour is sparse: a motorcycle chase here, a short ring fight there. No great shakes. Once the film leaves Macau and goes back to Hong Kong, things pick up. There's an exceptionally well-photographed chase and gunfight on the tops of apartment buildings that leads to the subway, where Max Zhang throws down with Juju Chan. Her character is a yoga teacher and professional dancer, so her fighting style involves using the metal poles and railings inside the subway car to do flips and twirls and acrobatic kicks. I like the idea, as it reminds me of early 1990s choreography. But then the subway goes off the rails and so does the fight, as the two keep fighting despite the fact that the subway car keeps turning over (physics be damned!). The lack of logic, compounded with the cruddy CGI for the exterior shots of the subway car, just cheapen the sequence immensely.

The next big fight, in which Max Zhang and Anderson Silva practically raze a precinct building by hurling and/or breaking every piece of furniture inside the office is a lot better. The two men come across as equals and there's a nice intensity to the fight. Their final rematch, however, is less impressive. This is where bad decisions on the part of our action directors really display the gulf between real fighters and screen fighters. Anderson Silva is definitely a good martial artist, and before he suffered his more debilitating injuries, I imagine he might've been able to take out Max Zhang fairly easily in real life. But onscreen, Max Zhang is doing all sorts of aerial kicks and wushu-influenced moves, while Anderson sticks to his typical ring moves like basic punches and kicks. He looks completely outclassed by his co-star and just really stiff in comparison. It's a far cry form Dragons Forever and Wheels on Meals, I'll tell you that. Moreover, the two are fighting at a fitness center, which would be a great way to have some object and environment-oriented fighting, not too unlike Yukari Oshima's gym fight in The Godfather's Daughter Mafia Blues. If it had been them doing all sorts of moves in, on, and around exercise heavy lifting equipment, it would've been better. And once the fight moves to the roof, I swear there are shots in which CGI people are fighting, or badly-composited shots of the two fighting in front of a green screen and then inserted into a shot of a roof. Max Zhang is a good martial artist. He has proven it again and again over the course of his career. But he really deserved better material than this.