The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison tracks down the Chinese hit of the year - TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN (Soi Cheang, China, 2024)

Director Soi Cheang’s new Manga adaptation Jiu Long cheng zhai · Wei cheng / Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is currently the big-earning Asian block buster. In the early scenes, it raises hopes of a revival of the great Hong Kong action movies. However, this one settles into being long, ultraviolent and uninvolving. There’s also the uncomfortable feeling that it is a piece of Beijing propaganda that wants to remind us how lawless and ugly Hong Kong was before Mainland authority imposed proper control.

Despite a contemporary dim and busy look – like Les Trois Mousquetaires – as the film runs on we recognise the conventions and devices of the Kung Fu Cinema. The fight in the doubled deck bus could have been choreographed by Jackie Chan. The film even fronts the heavy-weight presence of Sammo Hung, once the sharpest tool in the Asian Cinema drawer. He dominates every scene in which his Mr. Big Vice Tsar appears and at seventy even manages a couple of moves for the fight scenes mainly left to doubles and the agile young actors who are more familiar to the people watching these regularly than they are to me. There are no significant female characters, though the billing manages to front a couple of bit players they can advertise to escape charges of excessive macho. The little girl comic, who looked like she was going to be an element, vanishes.

Plot has illegal arrival (one cut of a ship’s deck in a storm) Louis Koo providing the entertainment in a decadent (of course) luxury night spot as a no holds barred fighter who takes down an opponent for the delight of customers. When he goes for his pay-off, bleeding from being dragged round the broken glass on the floor, Sammo pockets the money and says he will use it to get the fake I.D. Koo is saving for. What he subsequently provides is so shoddy that the kid punches his way out of the dope warehouse grabbing a bag of what proves to be Blow instead of cash.

Louis Koo, Sammo Hung

He is pursued into the Walled City of Kowloon, which is as important as any of the characters and the film’s strongest element, with people living among its smashed concrete floors, scarred walls and tangle of air conditioners and electrical cables. Low flying air liners nearly touch the roofs. We’ve seen this in the films of Tsui Hark but it was never as grubby and menacing as this.

The residents give the wounded fugitive help but his attempts to push the drugs confront him with the ground level barber who is (of course) a martial arts champion, and easily takes him down. Some doctoring with a masked man in a store of porno VHS tapes, which are new to Koo, and he’s put to work with the barber’s helpers, whom he joins in crooked mahjong games. They become his new family.

This sanctuary is of course imperilled by excessive plot development as much as historical events. Criminal magnate heavies plan on buying out the Walled City for token payments and reselling the land to the developers, who will cover the site with new high rises. Meanwhile, a generational revenge plot surfaces and ambitious lieutenants exert control. The menacing silhouettes blocking the entrance to alleyways are OK but we are over the top with the hysterical villain having “Spiritual Power” that makes him invulnerable to edged weapons and can only be taken down in the tradition of King Hu’s costume actioners by the combined martial arts skills of the battered gang members. Also, as in the samurai adventures, guns make a belated entrance. I was watching the clock well before this.

I rate this one as an opportunity missed.