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Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: Benny Chan, donnie yen, Nicholas Tse, Raging Fire
Raging Fire is the Most Berserk Action Movie of 2021
Raging Fire, Hong Kong director Benny Chan's last movie, is 2021's most intense action movie, which says a lot in a year where we have F9 and The Suicide Squad. Chan, one of Hong Kong's premiere action directors whose movie career began in 1990, passed away last year after he finished shooting this, his 25th movie. Things go boom a lot in the movie. Bodies flail and fly through the air, bullets thud and blood spatters aplenty as total mayhem ensues.
Donnie Yen plays the last honest cop in Hong Kong who goes against a gang of sociopathic ex-cops led by Nicholas Tse, who were all sent to prison on Yen's testimony years before. Now they're out for revenge against everyone who wronged them, from the top brass who abandoned them, the tycoon banker who sold them out, the entire HK Police Force, and Yen himself.
Raging Fire is almost anachronistically old school in its "good cop goes rogue to take down his former friend turned psycho" plot that's also a strident piece of copaganda. One common trope in Chan's action movies is his bad guys are always sneering, sadistic sociopaths. They are never in the least bit sympathetic, even when being played by Nicholas Tse, a 90s leading man who used to play good guys with an edge. Tse uses that edge here to give some nuance to a cop-turned-criminal mastermind who's out to burn down the world. The raging fire of the title is his nihilistic thirst for revenge. He manages to come off as a convincingly vicious knife-fighter who presents a credible threat to Donnie Yen in the vicious climactic fight between the two.
Raging Fire has no CGI, and the stunts are real. It has insane car chases and stunts, utterly vicious gunfights – think the big bank heist shootout from Heat times 100 – and wince-inducingly brutal fights. Benny Chan was one of the last of the Old School Hong Kong action directors who does everything for real, and the characters on-screen look like they're really risking life and limb in the crazy stunts that Hong Kong movies are known for. There's a massive action setpiece every 10 minutes, from the opening raid in an abandoned mall to a fight in a shanty town with a drug gang (with a racist presentation of the only South Asian character to show up in the movie, and unfortunately, a common trope in Hong Kong movies) that ends up with a fight in the sewers to a mad car chase on the streets of Hong Kong, a hostage standoff in a school gym to an epic gunfight on the streets of Hong Kong. There's a mad glee in the go-for-broke action in this movie that feels like Benny Chan is willing to blow up Hong Kong to get his setpieces on camera. It's not every day that a director literally goes out with a bang. Raging Fire feels like a summation of Chan's career and feels like one of the last Old School Hong Kong action movies.
Raging Fire premiered at the New York Asian Film Festival and opens in select US theaters on August 13th.
Raging Fire
8/10
The craziest, most berserk action movie of 2021, in a year that has F9 and The Suicide Squad, that says a lot.
Credits
Director
Benny Chan
Starring
Donnie Yen, Nicholas Tse
Distributor
Well Go USA
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