The apartment complexes making up what used to be Kowloon Walled City effectively sealed it off from the rest of Hong Kong. Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In imagines Kowloon as a kind of steampunk ghetto controlled by an aging gangster known as Cyclone (Louis Koo).
Cyclone’s domain is a marvel of production design (by Ip Man‘s Kwok-Keung Mak) and art direction (by Sai-Hung Chow). Cables snake through alleyways and up walls. Clouds of steam billow over clogged drains and trash cans burst with refuse. The homeless perch on corrugated roofing overlooking perpetually gloomy courtyards. They sleep in dingy doorways and stairways, gather around communal TVs, pushing past each other on endless delivery runs.
Part of a wave of Mainland China refugees, Chan Lok Kwun (Raymond Lam) needs an ID card to avoid deportation. He wins a bare-knuckle brawl in a nightclub, only to be cheated by triad leader Mr. Big (Sammo Hung) and his underling King (Philip Ng). Lok steals a bag of their dope and flees, leading to the first of several exceptional action sequences. King and his men chase Lok down alleys, through stalls, and onto a double-decker bus. The stunts come at a furious pace, Lok besieged from every corner. The only way to stop his pursuers is to enter Cyclone’s world.
There he finds himself battling a new set of foes: Shin (Terrance Lau), the masked AV (German Cheung), the Twelfth Master (Tony Wu Tsz Ting), and others. Eventually he is chased into Cyclone’s barbershop. Given the chance to prove himself, Lok works his way into Cyclone’s gang. Flashbacks reveal how Cyclone rescued his boss Chau (Richie Jen) by killing the fearsome assassin Jim (Aaron Kwok). Cyclone promised to take care of the dying Jim’s family, leading to decades of tension as Chau tries to root them out.
Several storylines unfold before the action resumes. Clues are revealed about the son of Jim (the answer is not a surprise). Cyclone, a kind of benevolent dictator, has a conflicted relationship with Mr. Big, who will later double-cross him. This material skirts with the maudlin, rescued in part by Sammo Hung’s ferocious performance as thoroughly detestable bad guy.
The battle between Cyclone’s men and Mr. Big’s killers sprawls throughout Kowloon. Here King comes into his own as a kind of superhuman wuxia master, impervious to blows. The stunts here are inexhaustibly creative, even when they veer into the absurd. Based on the novel City of Darkness by Yuyi, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In has been in development for years. The film opened in Hong Kong in May, where it broke previous local records and is now the highest-grossing film of the year. It later screened at Cannes, and was selected as the Closing Night film at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
His hair dyed grey, Koo is effective enough as Cyclone, although missing is some of his steely charisma. And it’s always a treat to watch Hung, one of the towering figures in Hong Kong cinema. Raymond Lam also turns in a solid performance as Lok, but it’s Philip Ng who steals the show as a flamboyant killer in Elvis-shades and memorably tasteless outfits.
Director Soi Cheang started his career in horror before breaking out with the action film Motorway and the popular Monkey King trilogy. 2021’s Limbo, a complex serial-killer thriller released in black-and-white, shows how sophisticated Cheang’s approach can be. Last year’s Mad Fate, a delirious thriller that starts in a cemetery during a typhoon and descends from there into maddeningly circular arguments about free will, was one of 2023’s most entertaining and bewildering movies.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a more conventional outing, hemmed in by its multi-generational plot and sentimental twists. But you will not want to miss its action scenes, staged within phenomenal settings.
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In made its North American premiere as Closing Night of the New York Asian Film Festival and will open on August 9 in U.S. theaters.
The post NYAFF Review: Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In Offers Phenomenal Sets and Creative Stunts first appeared on The Film Stage.
