SHA PO LANG REVIEW

Everyone's buzzing about SHA PO LANG, the Wilson Yip-directed Donnie Yen/Simon Yam/Wu Jing/Sammo Hung action film from Hong Kong. It's getting bought and sold, it won't be released in theaters until later this year, the stills look hot, the trailer rocks, the print caught on fire at Cannes but we've all been hurt before. So the question is: is it any good?

Yeah, it's pretty good. This is my favorite Hong Kong movie of 2005 so far, and it delivers on everything it promises, but it doesn't do it the way you're expecting. The first half of the movie feels like Johnnie To's THE LONGEST NITE: dark and dank, claustrophobic corrupt cop action. Things get coiled tighter and tighter until the hand-to-hand action begins to erupt in the final third like a lanced boil, leaving walls, ceilings and floors coated in swathes of black blood and littered with broken arms.

Things get jumping with a man-to-man grudge match getting established between cop, Simon Yam, and triad boss, Sammo Hung, many years in the past. Both actors use their first few minutes to put the bits in their mouthes and just go, working themselves up into great performances. Simon Yam can give a good performance in his sleep, but Sammo delivers the best acting I've ever seen him do. He looks like he just wandered over from the set of HBO's OZ - he's a mass of knotted muscles covered with jailhouse tats, looking like a mobile, pissed off refrigerator.

The movie jumps forward to the present, and proceeds to unfold over Father's Day night. Uh-oh, it's symbolism! Of course there is - it's a Wilson Yip movie. Yam's retiring and he wants to take down Sammo before he goes. His squad is being taken over by Donnie Yen, but that happens in the morning. Right now, he's got one long night to settle scores. I don't want to give too much away, because it's a fun movie, but expect Wilson Yip at his finest.

Director Yip has never met an ending that he couldn't ruin and, to my mind, only BIO-ZOMBIE has a decent finale. But SHA PO LANG gets to stand next to it as a movie that holds up well all the way through. Being a Wilson Yip film there's plenty of off-kilter characterization and little digressions, some of which border on the cutesy, but he never crosses the line so far that he can't come right back. It's the his most controlled, best-sustained movie to date.

Donnie Yen, despite a few weird little Donnie Yen poses, actually acts for the first time ever. He turns in a performance! And it's a good one! Usually I feel that Yen is always thinking about how he'll look in the frame, and he seems to be projecting a pose more than he's inhabiting a character, but he actually manages to act in SPL, and I was pleasantly surprised. I take back all the mean things I ever said about him.

The stand-outs here are Sammo Hung, however, who turns out to be the movie's dark heart, and Wu Jing. Playing a hired hitman with a Kid N Play haircut and with about one line of dialogue, Wu Jing does it all with his body and turns in a gonzo performance. Camera tricks and "cool" action get left in the wastebasket and Wu Jing is allowed to deliver his stuff, piping hot and as fast as he can. And that's fast. The fight between he and Donnie Yen doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before: they made a lot of it up as they went along and it's full of mistakes, missed blows, and a lot of strategy. It's interesting to see two people fighting and thinking about what they're going to do next - I would never have noticed there was a difference between that and delivering choreography before, but now that I've seen what "real" fighting looks like, I want to see more. There's something alive and calculating in their eyes that felt brand new.

Is SHA PO LANG the second coming? No, but it's the best action movie to come out of Hong Kong in a long time, and it's okay to get excited about it. You wouldn't be burned.