The Raid
I saw some postings in the Asian Movie Newsgroup
that made this sound like a promising film and upon tracking it down it
definitely turned out to be a splendid little action flick. Like the old
movie serials, it is full of preposterous escapes, rescues and mile a minute
action.
Dean Shek is like a geriatric Indiana Jones as
he plays Dr. Choy (an old Chinese comic character in the 1930’s) and always
shows up just in time to save the day. Here he joins up with a small rebel
army group who are trying to find the whereabouts of a poison gas factory
that the Manchurian Emperor is building. The Emperor though is just a puppet
for two Japanese militarists – Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Joyce Godenza.
This film has some great action scenes. My two
favorites are when Shek is dangling from a rope from the face of a dam
and a plane is trying to shoot him down. He uses dynamite to blow a hole
in the dam and the gushing water knocks the plane out of the air. Then
later there is a scene where the ninjas fly in on the wings of propeller
planes and jump off into the fight below whereupon Shek cuts them to pieces
with his sword. Jacky Cheung, Fennie Yuen and Chu Kong are also on hand
to fight the villains. And on top of all this is a nice little musical
show number!
One posting mentioned that this film bombed in
HK which is unfortunate because it has sequel written all over it. It was
produced by Tsui Hark.
