News

With the onset of movie streaming platforms you can get a bit nostalgic for the days of roaming around the video store searching for something to watch and a little element of added mystery as to what you were watching, as the internet had yet to take hold. For many of those of us who lived that era, our introduction to the world of Hong Kong Action cinema was the documentary “Cinema of Vengeance”. Among the many clips it showed (and made you want to find the film in question) was “Tiger Cage 2”. When I did indeed track down a copy of “Tiger Cage 2” in my local HMV, it had bestowed on it's cover an image of Donnie Yen wielding a sword and a swift purchase soon made. At this time, any new movie was an adventure and little was I to know that I was about to...

The Film

The title of this film is confusing. I first saw it on a Hong Kong Legends DVD as In the Line of Duty. Hkl had released the first film in the series, Yes Madam, as Police Assassins, then skipped directly to this fourth entry. To be fair to them, it never made much sense to pretend that they exist as part of a series, despite the onscreen title for this one—Royal Madam IV: The Witness—again combining elements of the titles of the first two films.

However the title is styled, this one picks up with Cynthia Khan’s Inspector Yeung, who was introduced in the previous film, and would carry over into several more tenuously linked sequels. To begin with we find Yeung in Seattle, helping US Police. There, she and Luk Wan-ting, an immigrant worker moving boxes for a gang of drug smugglers, get caught...

John Wick: Chapter 4 is marking yet another chance for the West to get to know Donnie Yen, one of Asia’s top leading men. He has already been in several other major Hollywood franchises. He played the scene-stealing Force-sensitive blind master Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the lure for the Asian market role in XXX: Return of Xander Cage, and Commander Tung in the Disney live-action flop, Mulan. However, in that same period when these Hollywood films came out, Yen made 10 of his own Asian-produced films where he was the leading man.

Action films are Yen’s specialty, so Yen’s inclusion in John Wick is a perfect fit. His mother is Grandmaster Bow Sim Mark, a pioneer in the global dissemination of Wushu. Wushu is a flamboyant acrobatic style of Kung Fu, designed for competition. It’s the same style that produced Jet Li along...

On a chilly Oscars eve, Donnie Yen has just returned from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, where he was rehearsing for the Academy Awards along with a slew of fellow global superstar presenters like Spain’s Antonio Banderas and India’s Deepika Padukone. The “John Wick: Chapter 4” scene-stealer, who hails from southern China, feels good about how the following night might unfold, namely for his friend and Hong Kong neighbor Michelle Yeoh. Her victory and that of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” would be a landmark moment for Asian representation, he says.

“I’ve known her for more than 20 years, and that’s one of the reasons I’m here — to support her and share in a possible historical moment,” he says of his “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny” co-star. “And ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ has a lot of Chinese language and it talks about the Chinese heritage,...

Much like the Prom Night series, or in martial arts cinema the later additions to the Police Story franchise, the Tiger Cage films don’t feature ongoing characters or tell linked stories. The only real tie is that they share cast members and are all martial arts cop movies directed by Yuen Woo-Ping.

The Films

Tiger Cage is about an anti-drug team in the Hong Kong Police force in which there may be corruption, with potentially several of the task force members working with and supplying dealers. Simon Yam plays the head of the unit, while Jacky Cheung, Carol ‘DoDo’ Cheng, Bryan Leung and Donnie Yen are among the detectives he commands. The tone is largely quite serious, and that’s the film’s main downfall, because it’s not something that Yuen Woo-Ping does especially well. In particular, he’s prone to letting his cast overact. They’re having fun,...

In the late 1980’s into the early 90’s, the short lived D&b Films made a series of kinetic action movies that caught the attention of fans of the genre globally. As Hong Kong action cinema gravitated to a more modern style, the mixture of martial arts and gunplay these films displayed were far in advance of anything the west was producing.

An anti drug squad headed by Brother Lung (Leung Kar Yan) succeeds in taking out most of a drug syndicate in an explosive shoot out and only narrowly failing to capture the main trafficker Swatow Hung (Wong Lung Wei). Lung is about to retire and marry fellow cop Shirley Ho (Carol Cheng). After a party attended by friends and teammates, Fan Chun-yau (Jackie Cheung), Terry (Donnie Yen), and Uncle Tat (Ng Man-tat), Lung is killed by Hung outside his house. Seeking revenge, the rest of...