2/5 stars
Another month, another disappointing boxing drama. After the Lunar New Year action comedy and last month’s overly melodramatic , Hong Kong cinema-goers must brace themselves for yet another forgettable dose of mediocrity in the shape of Unleashed, a movie so inadequately scripted its plot is almost impossible to summarise.
Written and directed by first-time filmmakers Kwok Ka-hei and Kwok Yat-choi, this trifle does offer a range of nice aerial shots of gritty Hong Kong neighbourhoods – an afterthought in most Hong Kong-China co-productions today. It also provides a rare leading part for Ken Low Wai-kwong, a former stuntman in Jackie Chan movies who has since developed into a solid supporting actor.
Low plays Debo, the financially struggling owner of a rooftop boxing gym and the martial arts teacher of Kit (Sun Zhenfeng), the reigning champion in the local underground boxing scene. Out of the blue, Debo is approached by former protégé, Lok (Sam Lee Chan-sam), to arrange a fight between Kit and Sholin (Zheng Ziping), a notorious boxer from Thailand known to have killed an opponent during a match.
They don’t realise that Lok is out for revenge – he got involved with drugs and spent eight years in prison after losing a match that Debo arranged for him once. But that doesn’t explain how Kit is so easily beaten by Sholin in the subsequent fight, and left paralysed from the waist down. And that’s just one third into this plodding movie.
Kit embarks on a predictable, albeit medically miraculous, road to recovery; meanwhile we witness the struggles of Fu (Venus Wong Man-yik, ), an aspiring actress who finds it hard to get her big break after rejecting a predatory filmmaker’s advances. Her story, while intriguing, is superfluous to the boxing narrative, and a supposed romance between Fu and Kit lacks sparks.
Unleashed becomes even less plausible in its final third, when Debo inexplicably challenges Sholin to a fight, while refusing to let Kit go back in the ring. There is only so much empathy the audience can have for these protagonists when their actions seem motivated less by a deep yearning for redemption than by the filmmakers’ desire to wrap up the story with a boxing match.
The fight scenes, choreographed by Chris Collins ( , ), are helped by both Sun and Zheng being professional martial artists, and are decently staged. But Unleashed fails to generate the dramatic tension required to make the fights matter. The lack of any memorable training montages, a staple of boxing films, is especially lamentable.
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