Director: Wu Ma
Writer: Hsiang Kan Chu
From: Cult Cinema
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A gang steals a treasure map and divides it into 8 parts, pledging to reunite in 3 years to claim the reward. 3 years later, a dogged cop is hunting down each and every member.
Not much to tell about this movie. A gang called “The Dragons” breaks into a house, steals a map, and kills the man who lives there. The gang leader didn’t want anyone to be murdered, but it happened anyway. Since the murder is going to put increased attention on the gang, the leader decides to wait three years before following the map to the treasure. Some members disagree so the leader breaks the map into eight pieces, giving one to each member.
Just shy of three years later, one of the gang is caught robbing a place and put in jail. He breaks out, but learns that his escape was a scam engineered by a cop hunting down all eight members of the gang. They fight, cop wins, crooks dies.
And that formula generally plays out through the rest of the film. Eventually the cop is down to only two pieces, but is gravely injured. He’s taken in by a woman he’d joined with earlier to beat up some thugs and it turns out her father is the gang leader. The other surviving member arrives as well. The father wants to be done with his criminal past and gives both his piece and all the pieces the cop has found to the final member, but the final member decides to kill the father anyway. The cop and daughter track the killer down, face off against him, and eventually kill him. THE END.
The cop is after too many people. If this were a tv series or several movies, you could get away with eight distinct villains, but this is a ninety minute movie. Assuming you have ten minutes for set-up and credits, that gives ten minutes per villain. Granted, you can do incredible things in short films, but it’s hard to make each villain unique and threatening when they have so little time.
Not that the movie doesn’t try. The cop finds one crook caring for the crook’s blind mother and ailing son. The cop offers to leave the guy alone and provide money for a doctor for the boy if the crook just hands over the map piece. The crook declines the offer, they fight, he dies, but it’s a character moment and an attempt to differentiate him from the other characters. The reason it fails is that it’s so short. We don’t see the crook weighing the decision, the consequences of the cop killing him, or much of the reaction from the crook’s wife. It’s a good impulse, well-executed, but just hamstrung by the available time.
On top of that, the fight choreography didn’t pull me in. The cop had a specific move he’d make with his foot just before he was about to fight, but that was the only distinction. I may not understand martial arts movies enough to tell what is good and bad choreography. Tiger Love is obviously bad with hits that don’t land and stuntmen clearly waiting for the swing to come in, and Shaolin Deadly Kicks at least doesn’t fall into that trap. However, it’s mostly people hitting each other. Very few of the encounters showed any invention or novelty.
In the end, it’s so-so—not that good, but not terrible. I’m sure you could find ways to riff it if you were so inclined
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