Mark Reviews Movies: RAGING FIRE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2021

Few action plots are more basic than that of a battle between cops and robbers. That's the essential story of Raging Fire, which pits a dedicated, by-the-books police officer against a team of equally dedicated but ruthless criminals, hell-bent on stealing an inordinate amount of money from an unknown location in Hong Kong. There's a bit of a twist: The robbers are also looking for revenge, not only against the hero cop, but also against a system they are certain—and have a pretty solid argument that it has—wronged them.

The foundation is mostly familiar but also sound and a little more complex than we might expect from this foundational premise. It's enough to serve as an excuse—and just a bit more—for the real goal of the film's writer/director, the late Benny Chan. This marks Chan's final film—its release arriving after his death in 2020. Before his passing, Chan worked for three decades in the world of Hong Kong cinema. His last film displays a lot of confidence in how much he learned during that period and his ability to execute an inventive action sequence, filled with plenty of real-life spectacle and increasing stakes.

It's not only Chan's film, though (A final memorial during the credits does justice to his work behind the camera, for certain). The action belongs, in some considerable part, to the film's star Donnie Yen, who does double duty here—playing the leading-man cop of righteous morality and ethics, as well as serving as the project's action director.

Yen, of course, has his own storied career in the movies, working in the industry—for about the same amount of time as Chan before the writer/director's death—as an actor, choreographer, and occasional filmmaker. For some unknowable—but certainly able to be deduced—reason, Yen has yet to cross over from local stardom to become an American action star (He usually plays a supporting role, where he can still outshine the marquee-topper in skill and presence). For whatever reason, that day of wider success and recognition may never come, which is why it's worthwhile to see the star in his true element. We get that here.

Yen plays Shan, a Regional Crime Unit inspector who has made a name and reputation for himself as skilled cop and a good apple among a pretty rotten bunch. The department is currently waiting for orders to perform a years-in-the-making drug bust.

Before that happens, Shan gets on the bad side of the superintendent (played by Ray Lui). At a private meeting at an expensive restaurant, the boss wants Shan to drop charges against a wealthy man's son, who attacked a cop. Shan, whose wife (played by Qin Lan) is pregnant and who probably could use the promised promotion for bending the rules, considers the offer. Instead, he pays for the two sips of tea he drank at the meeting and leaves. Shan and his team are kept out of the sting.

This turns out to be somewhat fortuitous—for Shan, at least. The raid becomes a massacre, as Ngo (Nicholas Tse) and his gang of thieves kill the drug dealer, murder several cops, and injure a dozen or so more in rather dynamically brutal shootout at an abandoned mall.

Shan determines to find the criminals who killed his colleagues. Ngo has his own plans, involving an apparent bank robbery and getting revenge on Shan. The gang leader and his men are former cops, sent to prison for killing a suspect—with Shan's testimony serving as the final nail in their legal coffin.

That's essentially the extent of the plot—portrayed with a fine sense of momentum, apart from a few unnecessarily extended flashbacks to Shan's previously buddy-buddy relationship with the head robber and Ngo's trial. The former cops were certainly wronged, being ordered to rescue an abducted business mogul by any means necessary by their boss (played by Ben Yuen), before being thrown under the bureaucratic bus by their superiors, who suffered no consequences. Shan gets it, having witnessed and fought back and suffered in his career on account of that corruption, but that's not an excuse to stop playing by the rules and following the law.

Mostly, all of this is put in place for multiple action sequences. There are shootouts and fights, of course, but from that early gunplay in the empty mall, it's clear that Chan and Yen have little desire to keep matters too simple and straightfoward.

Looking for and finding Ngo in a neighborhood of shacks, Shan and the robber shoot at each other through, respectively, the ceiling and the floor of two-story building, before the cop has to battle a bottleneck of goons through a doorway and in the street, while also chasing Ngo into the sewer. The criminal mastermind and his cohorts get a scene of vicious slaughter, using all sorts of props and Ngo's trademarked knives, against the man arranging the robbery. A chase on a busy highway becomes a close-quarters brawl—with Shan driving a car and Ngo riding next to it on a motorcycle. A pair of climactic action sequences involve a shootout amidst a traffic jam and a final battle between the main characters in a church that's under construction.

That last fight, by the way, continually changes the weapons, the maneuvers, and the background props, giving both Yen and Tse plenty of chances to show off their skills—and us a chance to repeatedly be surprised at them and how well the sequence is staged, paced, and shot. It's a pretty exhilarating display, but Raging Fire also possesses several scenes that almost match it.

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