Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In amounts to not a whole lot more than a turf war that explodes after a period of dormancy and a colossal misunderstanding involving a bag of drugs, which director Soi Cheang uses as an excuse to stage a bunch of martial arts action and bloody violence. It comes from a series of graphic novels by Yuyi, who took the basis of this story from those shared (in photographic and written form) by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot in their non-fiction book City of Darkness. Since the Walled City, an enclave located within the Kowloon City of Hong Kong, was a real place until the early 1990s, that story has been grounded in some sort of reality. Not too much of the real world creeps in, of course, because this movie is still somewhere on the outskirts of fantasy.
In other words, it’s quite a bit of pulpy fun, and when it moves well over the top and into the realm of the borderline fantastical, it’s more than a bit of silly fun, too. Cheang has populated his ensemble with some genuine legends of the genre, although there’s a possibility that a couple of those names are less established on this side of the globe. Surely, that can’t be the case for Sammo Hung, who was once synonymous with the type of martial arts films that a certain younger contemporary would eventually monopolize, but Louis Koo and Richie Jen have careers that are nearly as deep and prolific as Hung. They, too, establish a stalwart credibility within the material, even as it goes – to put it as delicately as possible – a little bonkers.
At first, it’s all about that bag of drugs – stolen by our hero Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam), who believed it to be full of money, and sought by Mr. Big (Hung), who had just scammed Lok out of the money he was desperate to be paid. Lok tries to sell it in Big’s territory, which is obviously a huge mistake for a mysterious and unfamiliar man in a city that distrusts outsiders. It puts him in the crosshairs of Big’s lieutenant King (Philip Ng), a henchman who will be addressed further later, and places him in the company of Cyclone (Koo), a thoroughly corrupt individual who is nevertheless the closest thing to a mayor that the Walled City has. Another important figure is Jen’s Chau, the leader of the triads, whose family was murdered in one of those past periods of bloodshed and rampant crime.
It’s an overused way to put things, but the movie’s setting is absolutely a character of its own here. The Walled City, originally built as a fortress by the Chinese in the late 900s, eventually became an overcrowded and densely populated entity with an infrastructure entirely separate from the city that surrounded it. It has been meticulously recreated here in the production design (apparently by way of two replicas for the purposes of filming), and the alleyways, various balconies, clumps of power lines and clotheslines, and general distance between structures becomes a landscape both claustrophobic and expansive in these fight sequences. In one scene, a character might run into an alley, only to find that it narrows to a dangerous degree at the other end, while in another, someone finds that jumping from a roof to a balcony depends entirely on the foundation for both.
As for the action sequences, these fights have been both carefully designed and expertly staged, with Cheang paying particular attention to the geography of the characters, often in order to send them flying (not always realistically) feet in the air and colliding improbably with a wall or each other. The weapons include axes, knives, swords or whatever else the participants can find in the moment, which means it takes a comically long time for guns to show up (when they do, they are just as comically useless). This might be a good time to address King, that henchman from earlier, who announces Cheang’s intentions better than anything else will here. He’s not the typical henchman, and it’s not just because he’s the vessel for a pretty good twist leading into the final act.
Let’s just say his skills are a bit inhuman compared to anyone else here, thanks to “spirit powers” that make him seemingly invulnerable to attack. It’s yet another silly idea, but it allows Ng a chance to gobble up the scenery and for Cheang to up the ante in both the staging and the motivation behind the action set pieces. By this point, the plot has turned toward a crucial mystery surrounding Lok’s identity and legacy, although the fact that this review has barely mentioned the film’s protagonist means it doesn’t entirely matter. It certainly has little to do with that climax, which pits King against the troupe of fighters assembled by Lok – Cyclone’s second-in-command Shin (Terrance Lau), kickboxer AV (German Cheung), and the katana-wielding Twelfth Master (Tony Wu).
Naturally, it all boils down to this fight, which mostly gives us a chance to see how it’s even possible to fight a foe like King. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In doesn’t entirely sell the shift from the grittier crime drama at the beginning to the action extravaganza of this finale. The overriding question is whether it even needs to do that. When the results are this gonzo and this entertaining, the answer might be a resounding no.
Photo courtesy of Well Go USA
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