Watched SPL (殺破狼) today. Movie was actually pretty bad. Not really sure why I sat through the entire movie. Maybe it was because it felt like it could’ve redeemed itself. Just a lot of fighting and kilings with no meaning. You can watch the trailer at the official site listed above. I’ll admit the style was interesting and the fighting choreography was really nice, but the storyline just plain out sucked.
Spoilers:
The story begins with a court case and an accident. The biggest crime lord in Hong Kong has been caught and pending the trial, he’s most likely going to be going to jail. However, the witness, on route to the court, was killed in a car accident, planned by the crime lord of course. The witness was even surrounded by 4 police officers. Of course the crime lord is set free since there was not enough evidence once the witness is dead. The main inspector also found out that he had brain cancer after getting checked up after the accident. Chances of curing it are slim.
The story fast forwards 3 years and now and that main inspector is about to retire. His team is sad to see him leave. Some time ago, he sent an undercover into the crime lord’s gang. Also, a new inspector has been assigned to lead his team and he’s been following the inspector around. I’m not sure if I’m using the term inspector, correctly. It could may as well have been lieutenant. Anyway on his last day, this undercover gets murdered and he had promised everyone on his team that no one would get hurt. So of course the team was really demoralized to see one of them killed. At this time, someone recorded the whole incident on tape and brought it to the police. However, it clearly showed the crime lord beated up the guy with a golf stick, but it was someone else who killed him. So the rest of the movie is about trying to frame the crime lord, but implanting evidence, destroy duplicates of the tape, and etc. However, their plan fails and the crime lord promises to have everyone of them killed that night and that does happen, besides the captain and the new guy. Just a lot of sensless killing and at the end it didn’t really resolve anything. Thanks to Donnie Yen’s amazing fighting skills, he gave up his police badge and gun and beat the crime lord in a match, I think killing him in the end. I do have to admit, I might’ve watched the China version where the last 5 minutes were cut to make it “politically correct”. The ending was horrible, just horrible.