Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

KineticSeoul This is a low budget movie about good intentioned cops taking the law into their own hands to take out the bad guys. With some kung-fu fighting mixed in. When it came to the cops trying to frame and wipe out the bad guys, it just wasn't all that interesting. Nor was it all that entertaining to watch. In another words it just wasn't one of the great Hong Kong crime syndicate movie or anything like that. So I just wanted to get to the fight scenes. Which is very very few in this movie. There is two main things that stands out about this movie. The first, is the fight between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing. The second is the ending, which I just didn't expect. Besides that this is a watchable flick, but not really a stand out movie.6/10

mrrockey Kill Zone is yet another Hong Kong crime thriller with a little bit of moral ambiguity thrown in to convince the critics that it's deeper than it really is. It's certainly not an original film and it does feel a little bit like an Infernal Affairs wannabe. But is it still a good movie? Let's take a look, shall we?Firstly, the story. The story is that of a cop who tries to frame a mob boss for murder for murdering his witnesses in the past. But as expected, things eventually start going wrong and the cop ends up trying to both escape the law and the mob. This story is actually pretty good albeit a little cliché. To be honest, I am kinda sick of seeing the typical " bad cop " in Hong Kong crime thrillers. We all know he's gonna end up dead by the end of the movie and we all know things aren't going to go well for him so we just kinda end up sitting there waiting for sh!t to go down for him. But other than that, I quite like this story. I like how fast-paced it moves. It opens immediately with the murder of the witnesses via car crash and from then on it never slows down. Yip(director) goes through a lot of information using visuals instead of dialogue which I always like. He also keeps the film at a brisk 93 minute runtime without feeling rushed which is pretty commendable. So pacing is definitely one of the film's strong points!The story here does raise an interesting question, is it ever okay to break the law for the good of mankind? The cops in this movie murder, threaten, and provide fake evidence all just to frame the mob boss, Wong Po. Most of them end up getting murdered and the last survivor dies of a tumor in the end anyways. Wong Po in this movie is depicted as an extremely powerful crime boss here who's murdered probably dozens of people but should they be allowed to use dirty tactics just to send this man to prison? The movie never answers for us, it lets us decide on our own. So there is an interesting question to think after seeing this movie.Surprisingly, there isn't that much action in this movie. There's a few fight scenes in this movie and they are actually quite brutal and spectacular but this movie is a lot more plot-driven than action-driven. I really don't mind this because of how well-paced and intense this movie gets. When there are fights though, they are brutal, fast-paced, and intense. And you'll never be able to take your eyes off the screen.The performances are quite good. Simon Yam is actually really good here as a tough, ruthless cop. He seems like a good man blinded by rage. Donnie Yen is just playing Donnie Yen but he's always good at playing Donnie Yen so no complaints here. The one actor who I think steals the show is Sammo Hung. In the 80's and 90's, Sammo Hung was always the funny guy. He had a cute, chubby look to him so he was constantly typecast as a cute, lovable guy but here, he's not clowning around! In this movie, he is a complete bad@ss! Everyone else is good too.The cinematography has a very wide, clean look to it which makes the brutal violence look even more brutal. It's a very good looking film!Overall, it's a little cliché but it's still a fun, intense ride with a few interesting questions to discuss after seeing it so I'll give it a 7/10.

p-stepien Hong Kong lives under the shadow rule of crime lord Wong Po (the ageless Sammo Hung Kam-Bo). This reign was thought to have ended with evidence enough to put him in jail, but the key witness is killed together with his wife. The detective leading the case Chan Kwok Chung (Simon Yam) adopts the orphaned child of the victims and promises a no-holds-barred revenge. Time however is short, as Chung is diagnosed with brain cancer. This forces his hand to take an approach which is borderline lawless.With less than two days left before he has to retire Chung and his team of elite police decide to take matters into their own hands and stop at nothing to get their man (supplanting evidence, killing weak links to fabricated charges and terrorising witnesses). This however does not fit well with the replacement inspector Ma Kwun (Donnie Yen), who confronts the team about their methods...A dastardly movie trying to sway in the direction of "Infernal Affairs" with a martial arts twist to it, it does manage to imprint a touch of class to the story with some almost art-house scenes and underline it with one terrific fight scene in a back alley (Donnie Yen vs Jacky Wu is quite intense and the length of sequences that go on without cuts / montages is impressive).Nonetheless the movie fails badly in the basics. Elements of back-story are constantly fed into the story in an attempt to flesh out characters, their motivations and add some dramatic punch. However these are poorly dealt with adding false notes throughout and seem forcibly attached severely limiting the dramatic flow of the movie. Below par melodramatic dialogues don't help proceedings as do severe plot flaws.The most damning is the attempt to manipulate video data in order to frame Wong Po for murder, when any sane policeman would have just used the available material to press charges for attempted murder and complicity to murder (both actions evidently filmed on tape without necessity to manipulate the video). Additionally since when is a videotape with someone hitting a man with a golf club followed by a shot of his associate shooting a bullet into the guys brain not enough to put someone in jail? These aren't the only such situations, which scream lazy scriptwriting.The movie does end with a sucker-punch (albeit preceded by a laughable not-checking-if-the-guy-you-beat-up-is-actually-dead scene) that deservedly gets a lot of praise, but all in all is too little, too late to actually repair the faulty unbelievable story.

kosmasp I love eastern cinema. Be it Hong Action movie or quite a few of the recent South Korean efforts (and of course Kitano). Since Tony Jaa came onto the screen (and therefor into many peoples lives), pure action movies do have a difficult stand. Ong Bak (the first one) set a new bar concerning action scenes. They even set the bar higher with Tom Yum Goong. Story-wise on the other hand, both those movies had not that much to offer.And the same can be applied here. Though the movie tries to have a coherent story, it never got me involved into anything. But the action is more than decent (even when compared to the Jaa-Mayhem). So watch this for the action and try not to mind the story too much.