It\u2019s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In,\u201d a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year\u2019s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d is also probably the best comic book adaptation you\u2019ll see this year, featuring a murderer\u2019s row of Hong Kong stars like Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok and Sammo Hung, and featuring the sort of intricate maximalist production design that puts most other blockbusters to shame.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On its face, \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d is a conventional us-against-them crime saga about Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam), a luckless refugee who settles down in Kowloon, the dystopian-looking tenement city of the movie\u2019s title. Chan\u2019s allies treat each other like family despite some mischievous double-dealing and back-biting; his enemies only think of themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chan\u2019s story, all about a community\u2019s triumph over mobbed-up individualism, has already found a receptive audience in Hong Kong, where \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d is already the most-watched local production of all time. The movie\u2019s reputation will likely continue to grow thanks to its lyrical pulp fiction dialogue, credited to four screenwriters, and its over-the-top fight choreography. \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d was custom-made to knock you on your ass, and while it\u2019s sometimes a little too desperate to please, it\u2019s also hard to resist a genre movie that works so hard to impress all comers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The movie version of Kowloon resembles an animated M.C. Escher painting, filled with overlapping stairwells, choked with rebar, and overstuffed with low-drooping cables that bulge and creep over steam vents and crater-pocked concrete. Paint doesn\u2019t peel off the walls so much as it accretes, one eggshell-thin layer on top of the other. Steam floats above the aluminum eaves but never seems to escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This movie\u2019s Kowloon is a haven for kind-hearted degenerates like Cyclone (Koo), a barber and the city\u2019s revered crime boss, as well as supporting characters like the media-obsessed AV (German Cheung) and his stalwart companions Twelfth Master (Tony Tsz-Tung Wu) and Shin (Terrance Lau). Their messy but stable microcosm is threatened by Chan, a desperate loner who only wants to make enough money to buy a fake ID. Chan is followed by the greedy triad gang boss, Mr. Big (Hung), and his flamboyant second-in-command, King (Philip Ng). Everybody knows how to fight and they all have garish wigs and costumes that scream mid-to-late \u201880s.<\/p>\n
Most of the first half of \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d sets up\u00a0the inevitable clash between Mr. Big and Cyclone\u2019s respective gangs. There\u2019s a little mystery surrounding Chan\u2019s identity, but it\u2019s not as memorable as the movie\u2019s action scenes, which feature the sort of manic energy that one might expect from a comic book movie. In an early scene, Cyclone flicks his cigarette into the air, executes some disarming moves, and then reclaims his butt before gravity can. This sort of fantastic establishing scene prepares viewers for later fights, including maneuvers like a \u201cspirit shield\u201d and beat-em-up video game-ready weapons like sledgehammers and lead pipes.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In,\u201d a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year\u2019s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, \u201cTwilight of the Warriors: Walled In\u201d is also probably the best comic book adaptation …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[36,50,37],"class_list":["post-1480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-action","tag-crime","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}