This is an entertaining enough modern-day martial arts action thriller which is, it has to be said, entirely unoriginal in almost every respect. The plot concerns a city cop returning to his hometown for the funeral of a childhood friend, victim of a back-alley knifing while chasing thugs from his bar. Together with a second childhood friend, our hero suspects something amiss and begins his own investigation into the murder. This decision is the cue for a succession of unlikely encounters and a particularly bloody and fatal encounter with yet another childhood friend.
There are some people whose personalities are so under-developed that they have a tendency to adopt the characteristics of those they are close to (accent, mannerisms, etc), and this film reminded me a lot of people like that. Watching it, I got the impression that the writer/director was mimicking every film he wished he'd made. There are a number of obvious 'homages', and a flashback to a juvenile fight that is as (hopefully deliberately) cheesy as any 70s chop-socky sequence. One of the 'homages' is to Quentin Tarantino's (himself the king of the 'homage') over-rated Kill Bill so if, like me, you were bored by Tarantino's self-indulgence, you might consider thinking twice about watching a film whose writer obviously thinks so highly of it. Having said that, there is something ironic about an Asian film so clearly referencing a film which blatantly ripped off so many of the staple devices of its national genre.
The action is as frenetic and professional as you'd expect, and the storyline is reasonably engaging but, when all is said and done, this is really nothing more than a decent time-filler.
