Not a remake of Sammo Hung’s 1978 action comedy despite sharing a title and rotund lead with it, Kenji Tanigaki’s Enter the Fat Dragon follows Fallon Zhu (Donnie Yen), a well-meaning but slightly unhinged cop who becomes overweight after suffering a break-up from his longtime girlfriend, TV actress Chloe (Niki Chow), and a demotion to the archive room of his precinct. He jumps at the opportunity to get back to the field with a mission to escort a Japanese suspect back to Tokyo, where Chloe is coincidentally staying at the same time, hoping to expand her career to the Japanese market. But when the suspect is murdered by none other than the shady businessman (Go Hayama) sponsoring Chloe’s Japanese experience, and the inspector in charge (Takenaka Naoto) proves to be corrupt, Fallon teams up with a former undercover cop turned restaurant owner (Wong Jing) to bring them to justice.
All posts tagged philip ng
ENTER THE FAT DRAGON (2020) review
Posted by LP Hugo on February 7, 2020
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2020/02/07/enter-the-fat-dragon-2020-review/
UNDERCOVER PUNCH AND GUN (2019) review
Produced by Gordon Chan, shot four years ago and formerly known as Undercover vs. Undercover, Frankie Tam and Koon Nam Lui’s Undercover Punch and Gun revolves around Wu (Philip Ng), an undercover cop who’s grown much too attached to Bob (Lam Suet), the mob boss he was supposed to help bring down, to the extent that he’s now dating his daughter (Aka Chio). When Bob is killed during a drug deal gone wrong, Wu finds himself caught between his superior officer (Nicholas Tse) who wants him to go deeper, Bob’s ruthless collaborator and old flame (Carrie Ng) who is suspicious towards him, and Ha (Andy On), a former special agent gone bad, who operates a meth trade from a cargo ship on the high seas, and wants the beleaguered undercover to deliver Bob’s chemist (Susan Shaw) to him. A desperate Wu can only count on the help of his loyal informant (Vanness Wu) and a special agent (Joyce Feng) who used to work with Ha.
Posted by LP Hugo on June 26, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/06/26/undercover-punch-and-gun-2019-review/
THE TROUGH (2018) review
Nick Cheung’s third film as a director and star, The Trough follows Yu Qiu (Cheung), a cop who’s been undercover so long in the gangs of the fictional Solo City, that his mind is starting to slip: he’s developing a death wish, the limit between the Law and Crime has been blurred out, and between two missions he goes to live as a hermit in the Namibian desert, fighting wild animals. Solo City is a degenerate, crime-riddled sewer, and there’s no shortage of mob bosses for him to take down, under the orders of his handler Jim (He Jiong), a lone man of honor assisted by hacker Jackie (Yu Nan) but surrounded by dirty cops (including Maggie Cheung Ho Yee and Chris Collins). Yu Qiu’s new mission is to unmask and bring down “The Boss”, the hidden mastermind who controls Solo City; and the key to bring him down may be a little girl (Li Yongshan), who was plucked from an orphanage for mysterious reasons, and is now wanted by dirty cops and half the city’s gangsters alike.
Posted by LP Hugo on November 13, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/11/13/the-trough-2018-review/
COLOUR OF THE GAME (2017) review
A belated third installment in Wong Jing’s ‘Colour’ series of Triad thriller – after Colour of the Truth (2003) and Colour of the Loyalty (2005) – Wai Ka Fai’s Colour of the Game centers on Dahua (Simon Yam), a weary Triad enforcer who’s given one last mission before retirement: to find and kill the degenerate son of gangster Brother Nine (Waise Lee), Robert (Ye Xiangming), who raped and killed Triad boss Dragon (Lau Siu Ming). Dahua enlists the help of his old comrades in arms Chun (Jordan Chan), fresh out of prison, and BBQ, retired with a bad leg but willing to assist his brother one last time, as well as Gao (Philip Ng), his protégé, Liqiang (Sabrina Qiu), his tough daughter, and Superman (Oscar Leung), a newcomer eager to prove his worth. The team gets to work, but as they’re being repeatedly ambushed by Robert’s men and followed closely by the police, they soon realize there’s a mole among them.
Posted by LP Hugo on June 24, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/06/24/colour-of-the-game-2017-review/
SPECIAL FEMALE FORCE (2016) review
Wilson Chin’s Special Female Force is a loose remake of Wellson Chin’s (not the same guy) The Inspector Wears Skirts, following a dozen sexy young women who enter a stringent boot camp where they bond in the hardships of training and flirt with the male team, before being thrust into their first mission, to stop a terrorist – who twenty years ago decimated the previous iteration of the Special Female Force – from spreading a deadly virus. Tiny subplots from the original films (there were four of them) also crop up, like the male instructor’s crush on the female one (Ken Lo and Jade Leung step in for Stanley Fung and Sibelle Hu), but on the whole Wilson is largely rebooting Wellson’s concept, while adding an unfortunate layer of teary drama on top of it. The Inspector Wears Skirts were no masterpieces, but they knew their place and remained jokey displays of eye-candy with some hard-hitting action thrown in. Special Female Force is plagued by tragic subplots that lead to cringe-worthy moments of tone-deaf emotional acting from the main cast. Philip Ng has a few scenes and a few spin kicks as an ungrateful boyfriend, in another soap-worthy little nugget of plot.
Posted by LP Hugo on January 27, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/01/27/special-female-force-2016-review/
SIFU VS VAMPIRE (2014) review
Amazingly, Daniel Chan Yee Heng’s Sifu vs Vampire is Hong Kong legend Yuen Biao’s first lead role in a feature film since Ricky Lau’s Hunted Hunter in 1997. We could imagine a better comeback vehicle than a crass Wong Jing-produced comedy, but we’ll take what we can get. Yuen plays Master Chiang, a Taoist priest and exorcist who together with his disciple Lingxin (Jiang Luxia) teams up with a pair of hapless gangsters (Ronald Cheng and Philip Ng) to fight – and sometimes fall in love with – vampires old and new. There’s a definite throwback quality to the film, as it harks back to the vampire comedies of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, most notably the Mr Vampire series which already featured Yuen Biao. Contrary to Juno Mak’s impressive Rigor Mortis, Sifu vs Vampire is straightforward and unpretentious, a loosely calibrated mix of (very) broad laughs, (very) mild scares and (very) sparse fighting.
Posted by LP Hugo on June 23, 2015
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/06/23/sifu-vs-vampire-2014-review/
ONCE UPON A TIME IN SHANGHAI (2014) review
The sort-of real life story of Ma Wing Jing, a wholesome country boy with stunning fighting skills who comes to Shanghai to escape poverty, only to end up befriending a charismatic but shady mob boss and losing his soul in the process, has already been the subject of two high-profile films, Chang Cheh’s The Boxer from Shantung and Corey Yuen’s masterpiece, Hero. Though that kind of half-folk, half-historical tale is bound to reappear on film every two decades, one would not expect it to be, as Once Upon in Shanghai is, scripted and produced by gargantuan and insanely prolific money-grabber Wong Jing, while being directed by edgy, often pretentious arthouse darling Wong Ching Po. And yet here it is, starring young upstart Philip Ng in the Ma Wing Jing role and the underrated Andy On as the mob boss, with prestigious action directing by Yuen Woo Ping and Yuen Cheung Yan, and a sturdy supporting cast of legends : Sammo Hung as the benevolent master of the community Ma Wing Jing moves into, as well as Yuen Cheung Yan, Fung Hak On and Chen Kuan Tai as a trio of rival mobsters called the Axe Fraternity.
Posted by LP Hugo on October 23, 2014
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2014/10/23/once-upon-a-time-in-shanghai-2014-review/