Tonally Chaotic Prosecutor Guilty of Being an Ass-Kicking Hoot
Donnie Yen leaps into the director’s chair with The Prosecutor, and the resulting martial arts-melodrama hybrid is a bizarre mishmash of events inspired by a real Hong Kong judicial case that is awkwardly mixed with an eye-popping action spectacular filled with the requisite ass-kickery the international superstar is renowned for. It’s exceedingly entertaining. It’s also not even passingly believable.
The whole thing is something of a Richard Donner (think the Lethal Weapon series) clone judicially mixed with the likes of Peter Yates’s Suspect and Corey Yuen’s Righting Wrongs. It also seems to be the first film (to me, at least), where Yen has finally acknowledged his age. His character frequently comments that he’s getting too old to be running around the streets facing down a never-ending onslaught of villains. Granted, that doesn’t stop Yen from standing in the spotlight for four eye-popping bouts of hand-to-hand rambunctiousness that are suitably athletic and even more visually extraordinary.
The plot follows Fok Zi Hou (Yen), a decorated former police detective who after seven years of additional schooling switches to the prosecutorial side of law enforcement. Working with Justice Department veteran Baau Ding (Kent Cheng), Fok’s first case initially appears to be a slam dunk. But there’s something about the dismissive ease with which everyone — including a hard-hearted judge (Michael Hui) and Hong Kong’s District Attorney Joeng Tit Lap (Francis Ng) — are so willing to throw the young teenager, Kit (Mason Fung), under the bus that rubs the rookie prosecutor the wrong way.
With Baau’s aid and assistance from the eager detectives from his old task force, Fok launches his own investigation into the case. Not only does he uncover a vast conspiracy led by a pair of crooked defense lawyers, Au Paak Man (Julian Cheung) and Lei Si Man (Shirley Chan), but the group also unearths a link to one of Hong Kong’s most powerful drug smuggling crime syndicates. With time working against them, Kit’s freedom hinges on getting a secret witness into the courtroom to testify, and it’s up to Fok to get them in front of the judge alive.
All of this makes for a crazy mishmash of tones and styles. At one moment, we’re watching something akin to an especially self-important episode of Law & Order, only of the Hong Kong variety. At another, things turn into feats of super-heroic daring-do straight out of a hyperkinetic video game crossed with a Yuen Woo-Ping-choreographed 1980s action fantasy. At a frantically paced 117 minutes, it’s understandably a lot to take in.
But Yen remains as magnetic as ever, and whether punching bad guys in the face or shouting down naysayers in a courtroom, there was never a moment I didn’t believe that the emotionally pugnacious conviction driving his performance was genuine. The actor-director also smartly surrounds himself with a terrific ensemble. Even the smaller parts are populated by performers willing to give themselves completely over to the material, and this helps make even the more fantastically cartoonish elements ring with a surprising aura of truthfulness.
The film’s best bit is when it goes full The Gauntlet or 21 Blocks, with bruised and battered Fok forced to drag his witness through the streets of Hong Kong and down onto the subway if he’s going to get him to the courthouse to testify. It is here where Yen unleashes what will likely go down as one of the best action sequences of this young year. Fok takes on one bad guy after another, events building to a brutal climactic confrontation with the drug triad’s most dangerous enforcer. Everything and anything on the speeding train gets utilized during this sequence, making this one of the most purposefully ruthless pieces of close-knit cinematic fisticuffs since John Wick Chapter 4 (in which Yen stole the show away from Keanu Reeves).
As for the rest of The Prosecutor? It’s undeniably messy, yet still wildly entertaining. I had a great time watching it all come together. No one in the case winks back at the camera, treating everything that transpires, no matter how goofy, with absolute seriousness.
Yet the actor-director embraces that inherent silliness at the heart of the narrative with equal gusto. The whole thing is almost a Chuck Jones Road Runner cartoon at times. This makes the film’s themes of economic and social inequality shockingly more effective than they have any right to be. While it’s easy to get whiplash watching Fok go from being supercop to Perry Mason-like lawyer to prosecutorial Batman back to everyman lawyer, Yen still taps into universal truths that pack an unexpected wallop.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
