2/5 stars
Preposterous doesn’t begin to describe Fruit Chan Gor’s Invincible Dragon, the big-budget crime thriller that had been hyped for its fight scenes between rising action star Max Zhang Jin ( Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy ) and Brazilian mixed martial artist Anderson Silva before anyone even knew much about its synopsis.
Filming was completed more than two years ago, but by coincidence the film is being released just three months after Chan’s no-budget allegorical sex comedy Three Husbands opened in Hong Kong cinemas to much controversy. Astonishingly, this glossy commercial film by the unorthodox Chan is the more fantastical of the two.
Co-produced and directed by Chan from a story he co-wrote with regular screenwriting partner Jason Lam Kee-to, Invincible Dragon is a bizarre mix of genres. It is a darkly comic police thriller wrapped around a serial killer mystery, punctuated by a cheeky voice-over narration that adds a touch of the fairy tale to the gritty proceedings.
Zhang plays Kowloon, an eccentric police inspector renowned for his dragon tattoos and, legend has it, his childhood encounter with a nine-headed dragon. A marvellous detective whose career is blighted by his impulsively violent behaviour towards criminals – Lam Suet plays one of his victims in a witty opening scene – Kowloon is soon demoted and sent to work in a remote police station.
When a series of murders of Hong Kong policewomen occurs in Hong Kong’s New Territories, Kowloon is invited back to crack the case – only to lose track of his colleague and fiancée Fong Ning (Stephy Tang Lai-yan) in mysterious circumstances during a botched attempt to trap the suspected killer.
A year passes and a Macau policewoman (and gym user) is murdered in the same way as her Hong Kong counterparts. Sensing an opportunity to avenge Fong, the increasingly erratic Kowloon again joins the investigation – this time alongside Hong Kong policeman Chow (singer Endy Chow Kwok-yin) and Macau cop Tso (Kevin Cheng Ka-wing) – to track down the murderer.
If this makes you think an intriguing sleuthing drama is in the offing, think again. As soon as Kowloon arrives at the gym, opened in the Macau Tower by former US soldier and Iraq war veteran Alexander Sinclair (Silva) and his trainer wife, Lady (Chinese-American actress JuJu Chan), any pretence of this being a police procedural goes out of the window.
Kowloon is oddly certain that the couple are behind the murders. Contrived backstories of various characters flood the narrative, and the choppily edited fight sequences that follow – staged in ever less realistic locations, including a light rail train spinning out of control – only make the story murkier. And don’t get me started on the magical final twist that is sure to invite widespread ridicule.
That the film goes so far off the rails is a real shame. The early, character-driven dramatic scenes in Invincible Dragon are full of promise for several cast members, including Zhang, thoroughly charismatic in the leading role, and Annie Liu Xin-you, who does an adorable turn as a Chinese medicine practitioner who is hopelessly smitten with Kowloon. However, Silva doesn’t have the finest hour of his film career, for all his character’s complexity.
We can only hope that Chan, having put this oddly paced, incoherent effort behind him, will rededicate himself to making socially relevant films – his strongest suit – in the current politically charged times. Fans of his films will no doubt agree that neither of his two major commercial projects of recent years – the other being the 2016 Chinese film Kill Time – are crying out for encores.
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