Renowned Hong Kong director Benny Chan’s final film offers a fairly routine story, but dresses it up with a succession of impressively executed, if protracted, action sequences. It stars Donnie Yen, who has been making martial arts movies since 1984 but still has all the right moves, as an incorruptible police detective named Bong. He rejects a plea to let off a wealthy man despite the promise of a promotion that would be especially welcome given that his wife Ying (Qin Lan) is expecting their first child and has health problems that could complicate the delivery.
The one thing that haunts Bong is that his testimony was responsible for the conviction of his promising protégé Ngo (Nicholas Tse) on a charge of excessive force that resulted in the death of a suspect three years earlier; the incident is repeatedly shown in rain-drenched flashbacks. Ngo’s recent release from prison coincides with a series of crimes in which other detectives have been killed, all men who were connected to Ngo’s fall.
Bong is certain that Ngo is behind the violence and confronts him in a succession of interrogations, but is unable to secure sufficient evidence to arrest him. His suspicions, however, are correct: Ngo has, in fact, assembled a team of ex-cops who use their knowledge of police tactics to infiltrate the drug trade and score successful heists. Inevitably the plot leads up to a major clash between Ngo’s gang and the police at the site of a bank robbery even as Ying is put in jeopardy.
It concludes with an extravagant one-on-one between the two men in a church undergoing renovations, which allows for the presence of plenty of scaffolding on which the stars can exhibit their physical dexterity. That is only the last in a chain of action sequences that punctuate the narrative at regular intervals—one of them involving a speeding car and motorcycle. Chan was an old hand at staging such flamboyant displays, and his touch remained secure to the end; Yen also proves that he has lost none of his prowess, even if his acting is otherwise unsubtle, while Tse positively exudes oily menace.
The film, which celebrates Chan’s long career in a nostalgic tribute during the closing credits, does little but recycle the tropes of the Hong Kong police procedural, but does so with considerable flair. The Blu-ray offers the options of an audio track in either Cantonese or Mandarin as well as an English dub, and English and Chinese subtitles. Bonus features include two short “behind-the-scenes” featurettes (3 min. total), brief interviews with Yen and Tse (4 min. total), and four trailers. Recommended for world cinema film collections with an interest in Chinese cinema and the action genre.