The Fatal Raid (2019)

The Fatal Raid (2019) Aka: Special Female Force 2 Chinese Title: 不義之戰 Translation: Unrighteousness the Battle

Starring: Patrick Tam Yiu-Man, Michael Tong Man-Lung, Jade Leung, Jeana Ho Pui-Yu, Lin Min-Chen, Hidy Yu Xiao-Tong, Jadie Lin Lin-Qi, Yona Fong, Elaine Tang Yi-Ling, Rosanne Lui Saan, Sharon Luk Sze-Wan

Director: Jacky Li Chi-Lun

Action Director: Johnny Tang Shui-Wa

The Fatal Raid is interesting in that it was promoted in some markets as a sequel to Special Female Force, mainly on account of the female-focus of the action and Jade Leung’s presence. Tonally, the films are quite a bit different. The Fatal Raid takes itself deadly seriously throughout its running time, even though it has the gall to deck a female SWAT team leader in mini-shorts during a potentially-dangerous raid. The film is a dark melodrama about PTSD punctuated by intense outbursts of violence, including a 20-minute final shootout. It is also a prequel to a remake of a 1990s cult favorite that we’ll probably never get.

1998, Macau. A group of Hong Kong policemen are trying to stop a gang of arms dealers from getting away with “the goods” before crossing the border. The team includes female cops Jade Fong (Jade Leung, of Black Cat and Satin Steel) and Shirley (Overheard’s Sharon Luk), detective Tam Ka-Ming (Patrick Tam, of Beast Cops and Kung Fu Cop), and his partner Hei (Michael Tong, of Phantom of Snake and Man of Tai Chi). The bust doesn’t go as expected and a huge firefight in traffic breaks out. Most of the police officers, including Shirley, are mowed down. A young couple gets taken out, leaving their daughter behind. And finally, in a moment of friendly fire, Jade puts a bullet in Hei’s dome.

2018, Hong Kong. Tam Ma-King is now acting as a public relations spokesman for the Hong Kong Police. Jade Fong is still around, but she is still visibly haunted by the events from 20 years before. And we meet our two younger heroines: Zi Han (Vampire Clean-Up Department’s Lin Min-Chen) and Alma (Jeana Ho, playing a different role than she did in Special Female Force). Alma is a badass undercover cop and Zi Han is a sort of behind-the-scenes strategist: The former doesn’t care for the latter because she thinks Zi Han underestimates her. But Zi Han is one of those borderline geniuses who can participate in a conversation while wearing earphones and listening to music and still repeat everything that was said and more.

So, our four heroes are given what seems to be a simple mission: the Deputy Police Commissioner (Rosanne Lui, mainly known as a singer, but had bit roles in Trilogy of Swordsmanship and The 14 Amazons) of the Hong Kong Police is going to Macau to give a speech about how their efforts have lowered crime in both territories since their respective Handovers. Tam, Jade, Zi Han and Alma are given bodyguard / police escort assignments. Jade is the most nervous about it, given her past trauma in Macau. She musters up the courage and accepts the assignment. Things go well at first, until their vehicles are ambushed by a bunch of anti-police activists (Yeung Chiu-Hoi, Simon On, and Keith Chung). Although nobody is hurt, it does get the head of the Macau police department upset at Tam. You know, the whole “Every time you come here, stuff happens and my job becomes difficult” business. 

In any case, Zi Han and Alma are quite adept at using modern technology and are able to track the hooligans to their hideout. The local chief allows them to hang around as consultants, giving the task of arresting the thugs to Sheila (Hidy Yu, of Vampire Warriors and Kick-Ass Girls). It turns out to be an ambush: a whole team of commandos and a madman with a 50-caliber machine gun are waiting for the fuzz. Zi Han and Alma step in and join Sheila to help stop the baddies, only to discover that the head honcho is…Hei! This culminates in another massive shootout in traffic, as Zi Han, Alma, Sheila, and another girl named Tong Yu (Jadie Lin, of Mission Milano and Undercover Punch and Gun) team up to bring down the bad guys.

As I said before, this movie treats its premise like SRS BSNS and tries to get into the psychology of a trio of characters who were horribly scarred (mentally) by the shootout in 1998. Jade Leung spends most of the film on the verge of tears, when she’s not outright crying. She does some action in the beginning but is strangely absent from the climax. Patrick Tam’s character is demonstrated to be quite upset at the lack of sufficient compensation given to the families of dead cops—very similar to Ed Harris’s character in The Rock. But when the bullets start flying during the last 20 minutes, he goes off his rocker and descends into complete psychosis, picturing everyone around him as arms dealers (from the 1998 debacle). And Hei has a bullet in his frontal lobe, so he probably had a complete personality shift following his accident.

The four young policewomen are mainly nondescript, especially the two girls from Macau. Zi Han is depicted as being incredibly intelligent, but that’s her main quality. Alma is a bit more hardened and bitchier, and that’s her character. Tong Yu doesn’t have enough screen time to have one dimension, so she sets herself apart by being a bit taller and prettier than the other girls. Sheila starts out as a complete non-entity, but by the climax, she comes across as being a mite unhinged. If I tell you that the mid-credits twist belongs to her, you may figure out where that’s going. But yeah, with six protagonists in a film that runs 84 minutes (sans the mid-credits sequence), none of them get enough time to feel developed.

There is a fair amount of action, staged by Chin Kar-Lok Action Team member Johnny Tang. He also worked with Corey Yuen on Red Cliff and Dion Lam on the Overheard sequels. He does a credible job with the action. The end credits show the filming of the action sequences, which mix gunplay with some limited fighting. There is some classic 80s kickboxing during the apartment raid, but most of the fighting is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So, expect some crazy leg locks and take downs interspersed with the gun action. I don’t fault the action in any way, but the climax suffers from a series of narrative choices that don’t make sense: the introduction of a character that the villains are extorting money from, the heroines’ sudden switch of focus to said character’s two bodyguards, the last-minute revelation that of the three “activists,” only one of them was actually bad. Plus, the entire final sequence is overwrought in its music and OTT emotions, but at one point suddenly becomes a light comedy (complete with goofy pop music) when a Macau policeman with a crush on Zi Han suddenly shows up to give them more ammo.

I wanted to like The Fatal Raid, especially after the goofiness of Special Female Force and the slick uselessness of Martial Angels. However, the film is too cluttered and underdeveloped to make much of an impression. It’s just forgettable.