Fierce Cop (2022)

Original title: 烈探

Super cop Zhang Tu (Richie Ren) is a third generation Chinese policeman in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. Zhang is trying his best as a single dad, and is certainly doing pretty well by movie cop standards. Alas, when he arrests the rapist idiot son of a drug and slave trade lord, said lord kidnaps Zhang’s son and brings him over the boarder into another unnamed country that isn’t supposed to be Thailand at all, no sir.

Our hero does of course take off in pursuit where his colleagues can’t help him – though his boss is actually as helpful as he can be, in what is a confusing twist for a movie about an angry cop. Zhang is, however, assisted by one of the women (Chen Yao) the bad guys ferry back and forth over various boarders to work in nightclubs.

In fact, he already knows her from the accidental nightclub raid and rapist son arrest, which does set up the two pieces of character development in the movie – her regaining her courage, and Zhang learning that moral uppitiness isn’t a fair reaction to sex workers.

On the character front, there really is very little else worth mentioning going on here. This already brings us to the main problem with Chen Tai-Li’s Fierce Cop – a script that’s really not very good at finding appropriate connective tissue between action sequences, and goes for some kind of mildly socially conscious melodrama that never hits because the material is so underwritten. The script is also cursed with one of the banes of my movie existence – flashbacks to scenes that happened about ten minutes earlier, suggesting filmmakers that believe their audience to have the memories of house flies. Also pretty bad is Fierce Cop’s insane unwillingness to even attempt to plot properly. Instead is uses coincidence as the main driving force of much of its plot. In an interesting turn of events, the film also goes out of its way to make its ending uniquely unsatisfying for reasons of what I can only assume is sheer laziness, first setting up the kind of anti-climax that undermines the impact of the pretty damn great climactic fight, to then eventually trundle into a happy end of sheer, idiotic coincidence, because, to speak with the movie “good things happen to good people”. To which one might also reply, “on what planet?”.

All of this is particularly irritating since the action scenes – action directed and most probably choreographed by Kenji Tanigaki - are genuinely great, full of clever uses of improvised weaponry, and a genuine feel of physical impact. Ren seems fully engaged in the action, showing screen fighting skills I can’t remember him having displayed before, though I could be wrong there. There’s an effective rawness to the action but also enough imagination to never let it devolve into “realistic” fighting.

In fact, the fight scenes are so good, it’s worth it wading through the rest of the film for them.