New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

LOUIS KOO IN TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS:WALLED IN

SOI CHEANG: TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN (2024)

Artfully cluttered everyman epic in a long-gone Hong Kong gangster enclave

Kowloon Walled City was an incredibly dense, decrepit, and busy, rickety, multitiered and dark underworld until it was demolished in the nineties with the takeover of Hong Kong by China. It is at once the incredibly rich reconstructed setting and the real star of this enjoyable, if self-undermining film, whose reconstructed location is better than its somewhat slow and perfunctory plot line, which probably works better in its source comic book. As the Variety review's title says, here, "Blazing Action Delights Get Marred by Languid Soap Opera." One of two Guardian reviews summarizes: "The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish." These are unkind, and mislead if they suggest this won't be at all a pleasant experience, but are correct in suggesting there are flaws.

Things begin with a prolonged street fight, straight wuxia stuff except almost invisible because staged in very dark surroundings, with many wince-inducing, bone-crushing encounters, designed to show that the underdog protagonist, Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is tough and invincible. But he's an illegal from the Mainland, and his struggle to buy an ID card from the local triad bosses is doomed. And still he refuses to join them, and winds up escaping from the remorseless triad leader Mr. Big (legendary actor-director Sammo Hung) and retaliating by grabbing a bag stuffed with drugs and making a run for it through long dark streets, onto a bus, and into - the Kowloon Walled City, where he's safe because it's ruled by another boss, a different jurisdiction.

Gone is the realm of the odious Mr. Big, to be replaced by "enigmatic crime boss Cyclone (an aged-up Louis Koo), an effortlessly cool [and chain-smoking] barbershop owner," (quoting again from the Variety review ). This world is decrepit, but in its scuzzy way rich, familial, and cozy. That Guardian reviewer calls it "a Piranesian labyrinth" - I like that - "of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise." It's some time in the eighties. People dance to disco. Karaoke seems to be a new thing. Welcome to Kowloon Walled City, in glorious decline (and gloriously recreated by the production crew of this movie). And to what all acknowledge to be the true star of this teeming, dark, somewhat lumbering movie: what the festival blurb calls "the true star, the "delirious production design," "a ramshackle metropolis fused into one fetid super-organism of exposed wires, makeshift shanties, and human desperation–teeming with triads, refugees, and wuxia-powered henchmen sporting rat-tail hair." Very much a throwback to certain glory days of Hong Kong cinema; a kind of hypertrophied version of the movies Wong Kar-wai was making before he became Wong Kar-wai.

Here begins an even more intense and prolonged struggle by our undocumented but tireless hero (a kind of parody of the over-motivated immigrant), who sleeps on eaves to save up cash and becomes known to the local, shall we say, 'administration.' By a third of the way through the two-hour film, Chan starts to smile sometimes. He starts to play Mahjong (or some tile game) with pals, and tells the boss of it all, Cyclone, that he wants to stay here. He was orphaned as a child, he says, brought up in foster care, never had a real home. Now he can sleep all night, he says. But remember, says Cyclone, you sleep well because of the people, not the place. Around Cyclone is a klatch of attractive young men, each with his own shtick.

Like a traditional epic poem, Soi Cheang's movie digresses when a detail of background becomes interesting and jumps into a flashback history. Eventually people tell Chan the story of how the Walled City became the way it is now ruled by who rules it now and what fell by the wayside on the way. This includes the "ruthless goon, the King of Killers, Jim," one of the chorus of youngsters recounts. "Sooner or later this place will be torn down," Cyclone warns, and in fact there are glimmers on a TV broadcast of the tentative plan to do so when the Mainland assumes administration of Hong Kong. But will this genre of movie ever go out of style?

Featured here (an all-male cast): Raymond Lam, Terrance Lau, Philip Ng, Richie Jen. For fans of Chinese fight genre and traditional Hong Kong gangster films, despite the warned-of soap-opera languor of the hero's trajectory, this is potentially a delight, depending on individual tastes, of course.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In 九龍城寨·圍城 ("Kowloon Walled City Beseiged City"), 125 mins., opened in China and Hong Kong May 1, 2024; other releases, and inclded at Cannes, Buncheon, Montreal. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF.
Sunday July 28, 7:00pm
SVA Theatre
Q&A with producer John Chong and actor Philip Ng
(SOLD OUT)