Tag: Andy On Chi-Kit

Hunt the Wicked (缉恶, Chris Huo Suiqiang, 2024)

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Once again set in a fictional South East Asian nation, Chris Huo Suiqiang’s Hunt the Wicked (缉恶, jī è) neatly unites the contemporary obsessions of political corruption and drugs as an earnest cop discovers he has an unexpected ally in a man he first assumed to be a crook. Consequently, and perhaps subversively, he realises that these twin problems can only be rooted out from outside of the official justice system and the rules of conventional law enforcement.

The opening sequence sees Wei Yunzhou (Andy On) and his wife Na Mei (Hong Suang) go after a chemistry professor who has secretly been working on a new techno drug called Ice Spider for a kingpin named King Long whom they have yet to identify. Making off with the designer drugs encased in ice, Wei Yunzhou is later confronted by hero cop Huang Minjin (Tse Miu) who takes the credit for their recovery. The city of Wusuli had been regarded as drug free as Huang and his colleagues had already rounded up all of the local dealers, but in fact, despite what Huang’s superiors instruct him to say in the press conference, the drugs were manufactured locally and that there’s another gang in town who are now running the entire operation alone.

A subplot about cleaning up the sewers to make the water drinkable hints at the embedded corruption of the society in which the mayor, who ran on a Duterte-esque anti-drugs platform, is later revealed to be the mysterious kingpin King Long and in effect merely used his position to take out the competition. Wei’s wife Na Mie later also hints at a persistent sense of elitism and inequality as Huang refuses to believe her claims that people are being abducted and used as drug mules against their will by insisting that it’s impossible for large numbers of people to be going missing under the radar. Pointing out most of them were from the slums, Namie explains the truth is they simply weren’t missed and the system so little values the lives of those like her from poor areas that it doesn’t bother to account for them. 

Though Wei first seems like he wants to take over the drugs business in Wusuli, it soon turns out that he as something else on his mind and like Huang is pursuing a noble mission in trying to get revenge against King Long. Realising they share a common goal, the two men generate an uneasy alliance as they team up to expose the mayor and take down not only Kin Long but all the other gangs who are working with him while setting free all the people he stole from the slums and getting rid of the source of corruption before mayor Song Pa can be elected as governor making him otherwise unassailable.

Huo ups the action stakes while making use of top stars Tse Miu and Andy On one of whom fights with a sledge hammer on a chain and the other a retractable knife on a wire. In some ways, these two weapons represent their approaches to justice, with Huang pictured on TV using the sledge hammer to smash through the ice and expose the drugs. He makes a noise and does everything in the open. Huang is so old school, he can’t even work the new printer. Wei meanwhile is a silent killer slicing and dicing with his knife on a string while otherwise using it to craft salmon sashimi at every conceivable opportunity. He’s pursuing his own kind of justice in the shadows and playing a long game that makes it unclear whose side he’s really on until it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really care about drugs or even really the corruption. He’s motivated solely by vengeance that is tinged with righteousness in that like Huang he is also trying to get justice for his men who were also casualties in this duplicitous war on drugs. 

As usual, the film ends with a roundup of the punishments all the guilty parties were given after being caught and arrested to ram home the message that both corruption and drugs are definitely bad things that no one should have anything to do with. It does however accidentally endorse the hero’s brand of rogue justice even if each of them also pay a price for stepping outside of the accepted rules of law enforcement. Then again, the fates of each of the female characters attached to the three leading men leave a sour taste in the mouth in rendering each of them mere plot devices in the guys’ machinations. The same could be said for the awkward characterisation of female police officer Tianyu (Gu Jing) as the squad’s maternal figure in her obsession with getting everyone their favourite dinner while simultaneously at the centre of a love triangle between boxing cop Li (Anson Leung Chun Yat) and the intense Huang. Nevertheless, the film more than makes up for any shortcomings in its high-octane action sequences and impressive production values.

Hunt the Wicked is released on Digital in the US on May 20 courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

100 Yards (门前宝地, Xu Junfeng, Xu Haofeng, 2023)

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“When my father went to the market, I always thought he was a threat to you. I’ve only learned now that you were a threat to him.” Set in martial arts hotspot Tianjin in 1920, nothing is ever quite as it seems in Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng’s 100 Yards (门前宝地, ménqián bǎodì). As a young man replies, everyone has their part to play in keeping the peace, or at least some sort of balance that allows the city to function while otherwise caught between declining colonial interests, warlords, crooks and the old world represented by Shen’s house of kung fu.

The struggle is in essence one of which way to lean. Old master Shen is dying. He must choose a successor and is stuck between his only son, An (Jacky Heung Cho), thought to be of insufficient skill, and his best apprentice, Quan (Andy On). Shen orders the two men to fight while he watches from his deathbed and admonishes each of them for holding back. Finally he tells Quan to beat An decisively or he’ll never learn and will simply be beaten by better masters later on. Quan knocks An out with a neck blow and inherits the school, but his management style immediately rankles former right-hand woman Chairmen Meng (Li Yuan).

Part of old Shen’s job had been to patrol the marketplace discouraging hoodlums from extorting the traders, but what An comes to realise is that it’s more like he cut a deal with them in which they permitted the illusion he controlled the gangs while he in turn turned a blind eye and allowed them to practice their art while wasn’t around. Everyone has their part to play, and like the 100-yard boundary around the martial arts school, it has clearly defined yet unspoken borders. Quan threatens these by recruiting hoodlums and Westerners into the martial arts society blurring what should be a hard barrier between martial artist and thug. He paints this as modernisation and egalitarianism, that he’s deliberately recruiting people from all walks of life so that they might all walk towards the future together. But in reality, Quan is merely a dictator in waiting quietly building up a personal power base that would make him unassailable in the martial arts world or otherwise.

An, meanwhile, has the desire to reclaim this space as one of greater nobility that keeps violence off the streets and settles disputes in gentlemanly fashion behind closed doors. Those who are defeated in a fair fight accept the results and consequences of their trial by combat with grace and honour. An signals his desire to leave the mainstream world and return to that of the Martial Arts Circle by breaking up with his longterm girlfriend Xia (Kuo Bea-ting) to pursue martial artist Gui Ying (Tang Shiyi) who is then also pursued by Quan in the belief she may know of the rumoured Fourth Fist Style of Shen’s family taught to her as a kind of safeguard against his eventual betrayal of the martial society. 

Xia is also caught between two worlds in that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Frenchman who runs the bank where Shen got An a job hoping that he would leave the martial arts world to live a “normal” life. Beaten by Quan, he takes the job and begins dressing in Western-style suits but is outraged when Xia’s father forces him to fight his bodyguards for the amusement of his guests. Tearing off his tie, he quits the job and goes back to wearing traditional Chinese dress while Quan, now essentially behaving like a mob boss, starts wearing colourful suits and sunglasses while taking violence to the streets and leading An to fight henchmen one by one until finally reaching him for their final confrontation. He forces An to fight with two short sabres with which he is unfamiliar in revenge for their previous duel in which Quan elected to use them falsely believing that this was Shen’s rumoured Fourth Fist technique which may not actually have existed.

In any case, An’s is then a battle of adjustment and acclimatisation in which he must learn to use these new tools on the go just as each of the men must learn to find an accommodation with rapidly changing 1920s society. The Xus’ action choreography is precise and complex, thrilling in its unpredictability while certain in its intent. The aim of the Martial Arts Circle is to minimise violence and so blows are often bated, we don’t need to see the connection because the winner is obvious. But there’s also a rawness and poignancy to the battle between An and Quan over a paternal legacy, the abandoned son yearning for acceptance and the talented apprentice nevertheless insecure in his master’s approval. The martial arts world is over, the conclusion seems to say, or in another way, perhaps it has only just begun as An begins his new life as a defender of a 100-yard fiefdom in a reclaimed post office just shy of its borders.

100 Yards is released Feb. 18 in the US on blu-ray and DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

One More Chance (別叫我”賭神, Anthony Pun Yiu-Ming, 2023)

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A feckless gambler gets a final shot at redemption when he’s suddenly asked to take care of an autistic son he never knew he had in Anthony Pun Yiu-Ming’s nostalgic drama, One More Chance (別叫我”賭神). Previously titled “Be Water, My Friend”, the film has had a troubled production history only reaching cinema screen four years after filming concluded in March 2019 and has been retitled in the Chinese “Don’t Call Me the God of Gamblers” which seems to be a blatant attempt to cash in the audience’s fond memories of similarly pitched Chow Yun-fat vehicles from the ’80s and ’90s such as All About Ah Long.

In truth, Chow is probably a little old for the role he’s cast to play as the middle-aged barber Water who’s long since fled to Macao in an attempt to escape problems with loansharks caused by his gambling addition. Of course, Macao is one of the worst places someone with a gambling problem could go and so Water is already up to his neck in debt and a familiar face at the local casino. That’s one reason he ends up going along with the proposal of old flame Lee Xi (Anita Yuen Wing-Yee) to look after her grownup son, Yeung (Will Or Wai-Lam), who is autistic, for a month in return for 50,000 HK dollars up front and another 50,000 at the end assuming all goes well. She claims that Water is Yeung’s father and even provides forms for him to send off for a DNA test if he doesn’t believe her, but at this point all Water is interested in is the cash. 

To begin with, he pretty much thinks of Yeung as cash cow, descending on a Rain Man-esque path of using him to up his gambling game but otherwise frustrated by his needs and ill-equipped to care for an autistic person whom he makes little attempt to understand. For his part, Yeung adapts well enough and tries to make the best of his new circumstances but obviously misses his mother and struggles when Water selfishly disrupts his routines. For all that, however, it’s largely Yeung who is looking after Water, tidying the apartment and bringing a kind of order into his life while forcing him to reckon with the self-destructive way he’s been living. 

Picking up a casino chip in the opening sequence, Water describes it as a “chance” in an echo of the way he’s been gambling his life just as he decides to gamble on taking in Yeung. At one point, he wins big on the horses but takes his winnings straight to the casino where he’s wiped out after staking everything on a single bet only to realise he’s been played by another grifter at the table. It seems that Xi left him because of his gambling problem and the resultant change in his lifestyle that had made it impossible for her to stay or raise a child with him, causing Water to become even more embittered and cynical. Where once he provided a refuge for wayward young men trying to get back on the straight and narrow, now he’s hassled by petty gangsters over his massive debts.

Nevertheless, it’s re-embracing his paternity that begins to turn his life around as he bonds with Yeung and begins to have genuine feelings for him rather than just fixating on the money while simultaneously recognising that Yeung is already a man and able to care for himself in many more ways than others may assume. One could say that he gambles on the boy, staking his life on him rather than endless rolls of the dice to fill an emotional void but also rediscovering a sense of himself and who he might have been if he had not developed a gambling problem and left it up to chance to solve all his problems. Unabashedly sentimental, the film flirts with nostalgia in the presence of Chow and Anita Yuen and largely looks back the Hong Kong classics of the 80s and 90s if with half an eye on the Mainland censors board, Bruce Lee shrine not withstanding, but nevertheless presents a heartwarming tale of father and son bonding and paternal redemption as Water crosses the desert and finally reclaims himself from his life of dissipation. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)