SPL: Kill Zone (2006)

Simply A Masterpiece

Absolutely Fantastic

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

I was surprised to see such a praise to this awful movie here at IMDb, so watched this on Netflix. This movie has a very convoluted plot with non-sensible fight scenes in between.The portrayal of police and their handling of the case is childish. When the plot has nothing to offer fight scenes are thrown in without much sense. One of the suspects ran from the police with four guys chasing, even several blows from steel rod could not hurt the suspect. Kicks and punches are fast but look absurd as kids fighting. Avoid wasting your time.

Hong Kong lives under the shadow rule of crime lord Wong Po (the ageless Sammo Hung Kam-Bo). This reign was thought to have ended with evidence enough to put him in jail, but the key witness is killed together with his wife. The detective leading the case Chan Kwok Chung (Simon Yam) adopts the orphaned child of the victims and promises a no-holds-barred revenge. Time however is short, as Chung is diagnosed with brain cancer. This forces his hand to take an approach which is borderline lawless.With less than two days left before he has to retire Chung and his team of elite police decide to take matters into their own hands and stop at nothing to get their man (supplanting evidence, killing weak links to fabricated charges and terrorising witnesses). This however does not fit well with the replacement inspector Ma Kwun (Donnie Yen), who confronts the team about their methods...A dastardly movie trying to sway in the direction of "Infernal Affairs" with a martial arts twist to it, it does manage to imprint a touch of class to the story with some almost art-house scenes and underline it with one terrific fight scene in a back alley (Donnie Yen vs Jacky Wu is quite intense and the length of sequences that go on without cuts / montages is impressive).Nonetheless the movie fails badly in the basics. Elements of back-story are constantly fed into the story in an attempt to flesh out characters, their motivations and add some dramatic punch. However these are poorly dealt with adding false notes throughout and seem forcibly attached severely limiting the dramatic flow of the movie. Below par melodramatic dialogues don't help proceedings as do severe plot flaws.The most damning is the attempt to manipulate video data in order to frame Wong Po for murder, when any sane policeman would have just used the available material to press charges for attempted murder and complicity to murder (both actions evidently filmed on tape without necessity to manipulate the video). Additionally since when is a videotape with someone hitting a man with a golf club followed by a shot of his associate shooting a bullet into the guys brain not enough to put someone in jail? These aren't the only such situations, which scream lazy scriptwriting.The movie does end with a sucker-punch (albeit preceded by a laughable not-checking-if-the-guy-you-beat-up-is-actually-dead scene) that deservedly gets a lot of praise, but all in all is too little, too late to actually repair the faulty unbelievable story.

Inspector Ma Kwun (Donnie Yen) must make some difficult decisions when he discovers that Chan (Simon Yam), the police detective he is about to replace, and his loyal men have been bending the law in order to convict ruthless gangland boss Wong Po (Sammo Hung).Donnie Yen first smashed his way onto my screen over twenty years ago in the excellent Hong Kong fight-fests In the Line of Duty 4 and Tiger Cage II; sadly, subsequent roles in some less than memorable films saw him slowly slipping off my radar during the 90s (with only Iron Monkey making any lasting impression on me). However, having just seen S.P.L. (AKA Kill Zone), a powerful crime drama enlivened by some amazingly brutal action, I'll be sure to track his every move from now on.Admittedly, with both Yen and Hung on board, I would have loved to have seen a little more fight action, but I found the story compelling enough to hold my attention until the inevitable bad guys/good guy showdown, at which point all hell breaks loose and kung fu fans finally get to enjoy some blisteringly fast and bloody battles. Also serving to make S.P.L. slightly more memorable than your average Hong Kong cop drama are the inclusion of a really loathsome assassin (played by Jacky Wu) and writer/director Wilson Yip's relentlessly grim approach which offers little hope for any of the characters and culminates in a real downer of an ending that left me speechless.7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

I love eastern cinema. Be it Hong Action movie or quite a few of the recent South Korean efforts (and of course Kitano). Since Tony Jaa came onto the screen (and therefor into many peoples lives), pure action movies do have a difficult stand. Ong Bak (the first one) set a new bar concerning action scenes. They even set the bar higher with Tom Yum Goong. Story-wise on the other hand, both those movies had not that much to offer.And the same can be applied here. Though the movie tries to have a coherent story, it never got me involved into anything. But the action is more than decent (even when compared to the Jaa-Mayhem). So watch this for the action and try not to mind the story too much.