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A Fight to the Finish
In the 1990's, SDU (aka Special Duties Unit, Hong Kong's version of SWAT) procedural films became a popular sub-genre of the cop drama. Most of this was spurned on by the success of 1994's The Final Option, which starred everyone's favorite Cantonese-challenged actor, Michael Wong, as Stone Wong, a tough but good-hearted SDU commander. Wong would go on to reprise the character in more than a dozen pictures, but by the time the straight-to-video New Option entries hit the market in 2003, no one seemed to care anymore. It was at this point that low-budget director Tony Leung Hung-Wah decided to (pardon the pun) get one last drop of blood out of a stone with A Fight to the Finish.
Actually, Mikey doesn't even play Stone Wong here, and he's really not in the movie all that much, given what is in essence very much a starring role. This was probably due to the fact that this "movie" (which is actually shot on very grainy and washed-out video) was made during a break in shooting one of the ten New Option films Wong was in during 2003. And this fact also seemingly kept Michael from doing his own overdubbing. Instead, the production employs a chap who sounds quite lunkheaded, though to his credit, he does get most of Wong's "Chinglish" mannerisms down pat.
At any rate, the story revolves around Michael, who plays a character who is named -- wait for it -- Mike Wong, a SDU commander who wants to leave the force to save his marriage to Pinky Cheung, whose dubbing actor sounds like she just smoked a pack of Kools. But after one of his officers (Ken Wong) kills a robber during a stand-off, the rest of the gang sets out for revenge by kidnapping a young girl who they think is Mike's daughter. And that's about it. Running at eighty-four minutes, A Fight to the Finish struggles to fill even that thin running time, with much of the first two acts comprised of characters sitting in a bar (probably the same place this POS was written at under the influence of one too many Tsingtaos) and dully reciting lines that were most likely written down on a cue card.
Things do pick up a very small bit during the third act, but when your action revolves around elements like a time bomb that is controlled by a kitchen timer that runs forwards instead of backwards, it's best to not get one's hopes up. By that point, though, if the viewer has actually managed to sit through a hour of this cinematic molasses their hopes have already been crushed flatter than MC Hammer's credit rating. No amount of fancy hyperbole can truly instill just how clumsy and awful A Fight to the Finish is. Unless you're hell-bent on skimming the bottom of the Hong Kong movie pool, there's really no compelling reason to actually sit down to watch this lame excuse for a film. RATING: 3 |
