Blade Runner, City of God, Charles Dickens? Funny the things that sprang to mind watching Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a self-conscious attempt to replicate the Hong Kong urban crime movie of yore.
It’s a dystopian actioner set in a shantytown and focused on a central character who you might characterise as a 21st century Oliver Twist. This recent arrival in Hong Kong is a refugee who gave all his money to a Mr Big (Sammo Hung) hoping for some decent forged papers, got fleeced and then wound up seeking sanctuary from the authorities in the Citadel, a vast, multi-storey warren of crime.
From here Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) attempts, Oliver style, to get ahead in the world, by allying himself with the Citadel’s big noise, a martial-arts master known as Cyclone (Louis Koo), and eventually befriends Cyclone’s right-hand-man, his Artful Dodger, Shin (Terrance Lau).
John Woo and Johnnie To were originally set to co-direct this movie, when it was first mooted about 20 years ago. Since then directors and stars have come and gone, among them Derek Kwok and Donnie Yen, and now here we are with Soi Cheang calling the shots and stonefaced Raymond Lam striking a series of poses borrowed from Jason Statham. Woo would probably have made even more of the Chan/Shin relationship, since he’s always all about the bromance, but there’s plenty enough to be going along with.
We’re most of the way towards dystopian sci-fi in this movie, though it’s probably set in the 1980s, when the real Kowloon Walled City (which is what the Citadel is meant to represent) was a teeming midden existing largely outside the jurisdiction of the Hong Kong authorities. It’s the representation of the Citadel, rather than character or event, that is this film’s triumph. What an epic of production design it is, every surface covered, every item distressed. World-building on this scale is rare.
Everyone in the Citadel (and this movie, it seems) is a martial arts master and there’s a lot of fighting, which starts out well choreographed and dynamic, thanks to a careful blending of wire work with CG. Later, though, Cheang increasingly leans on the montage style of putting fight scenes together, with multiple cameras, many angles and a lot of edits. There’s on-screen mayhem throughout, but in the later parts of the film you’re never quite sure how good any of the fighters actually are. On the other hand it’s nice to see that Sammo Hung still has skills aged 72, and who cares how much of an assist he got in post-production.
It’s also nice to see an old-school Hong Kong actioner – complete with neon glows and neo-noir settings, yellow and blue lighting, plus lots of guys in aviator shades with bad haircuts and big-ball swagger. Has Beijing decided to cut HK some slack and let it get back to what it used to do so well? It would make a change from its studios banging out yet more “three kingdoms” historical dramas, all of them allegories for unity under the communist party. We shall see.
As Variety used to say, the “technicals” are fantastic in this movie. The characterisation is solid, if a bit haphazard. The sudden increase in the prominence towards the end of Mr Big’s right hand man, King, for instance. This is a fabulous punkass 007-henchman performance by Philip Ng, but King seems to have arrived narratively from nowhere and it’s not like there was a shortage of guys in this movie who could kick ass.
Early on, Lam’s Chan Lok-kwan was shaping up to be a Die Hard-level implacable fighting machine but he gets a bit lost in the melee. Lam is good, and so’s the film, but it’s as if a great one slipped through the net. Too much input from too many hands, maybe. They make light work, as the saying goes, when they’re not spoiling the broth.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
