Rating: **
Review Date: 4/6/25
Director: Leung Ka-Yan
Cast: Yeung Ka-Yan, Patricia Ho, Damian Lau, Phillip Ko, Wai-Man Chan,
Chang Yi
Leung Chun-Yue (Leung Ka-Yan) is a rich and successful architect who likes to race cars in his free time. He meets an old friend (Damian Lau) at the airport while picking up his fiancée (Patricia Ho), and from that moment, his fate is sealed. His friend is in town to kill a jewelry tycoon (Chang Yi) who murdered his father in South Africa, and he leaves his diary with Leung. To tie up loose ends, Yi sends an assassin (Wai-Man Chan) to kill Leung, his maid, and his fiancée, while henchman Phillip Ko deals with Lau. Leung survives, which puts him on the road to revenge.
This is a mean and nasty film that revels in unpleasantness. The first half is a slow burn that shows how happy Leung and Heidi are and how wonderful life is, which all changes when the deadly and sadistic Wai-Man Chan shows up one stormy night. Leung's journey of revenge includes a bizarre and surreal fight in an opium den, another bizarre fight in a muddy junkyard with a deranged Phillip Ko, and some Mad-Max styled vehicular mayhem as Leung runs down Chan's Pontiac Firebird in a quarry with an armored truck. And let's talk about Phillip Ko's character for a moment. At first he's just a clean-cut henchman for the villain, but then he takes off his shirt and wig, and the entire right side of his body is horrifically scarred. Why? This is never explained, but he also seems to go a bit cuckoo in his altered form. Fortunately, Leung is able to get his revenge courtesy of a shotgun, which ends the film on a freeze frame as we contemplate what the law has in store for him.
Unfortunately, the film is a mess and has no clear sense of direction or continuity. It feels like a bunch of random footage without a plot to hold it together. Sometimes the film shows too much, and sometimes it's not enough. There's also a gratuitous and laughably out of place sex scene between Phillip Ko and his girlfriend, which serves no purpose except to maybe spice up the otherwise dull first half of the movie. Where the film shines, and also goes off the rails, is in the action scenes. Leung has a brutal and hard-hitting fight with Wai-Man Chan, which is arguably the highlight of the film. There's also a crazy fight scene in a bar that's overrun by motorcycles for no discernable reason. The gang fight in the opium den is totally surreal, and it's not even clear who he's fighting or why, as there is no previous reference to him. It looks like something right out of a post-apocalyptic science fiction film. And then there's the armored truck scene, which makes no sense, but it looks pretty cool seeing the truck plow through every ridiculous thing in its path. Sadly, the majority of the chase is undercranked to the point of absurdity, which sucks a lot of the enjoyment out of it.
While it's always nice seeing someone fighting against corporate villainy, the overall nastiness leaves a bad taste and reminds us of the perils and high cost of revenge. Leung will go to jail for the rest of his life, but evil lives on.