Killzone

Killzone (2005)

Also known as SPL, Killzone was the first release under the Dragon Dynasty imprint and stars Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, and Simon Yam, with Wilson Yip directing.

The film opens in Hong Kong in the year 1994. Inspector Chan (Simon Yam) is escorting an important witness and his family to the trail of crime lord Wong Po (Sammo Hung). A fatal car crash arranged by Po kills everyone except Chan and the daughter of the witness, and as a result, Po is released for insufficient evidence.

Chan is a driven man, wanting nothing more than to see Po behind bars and his empire toppled. He’s still in charge of the investigation and has a very loyal and efficient team of three other police officers alongside him wanting the same goal. It’s set up early in the film that Chan has a brain tumor as a result of an injury he sustained in the car accident, and he adopts the child that was orphaned that day as well.

Wong Po becomes humanized early in the movies as well when we learn he and his wife have been trying to have a child with no success. It’s very painful for Po, who desperately wants to be a father. A scene in the hospital goes to further illustrate Po’s kinder side with Chan’s adopted daughter, and Chan isn’t too happy to see Po talking to her.

Three years pass and Chan is two days away from retirement and has yet to capture Po in any wrongdoing. His successor is on the way, Inspector Kwun (Donnie Yen), and his reputation precedes him amongst Chan’s men. We then get to meet the men on the Po task force and Kwun in a little more depth.

Quickly, however, shades of grey start to creep in. Inspector Chan and his men have a mission that is noble, to stop a crime lord who’s involved in all sorts of underhanded activities, but the means they utilize to try and stop Po go beyond the authority they have as police officers. Kwun is shocked to learn this, and has to come to his own terms with all of it.

For the majority of the film, Chan and Kwun are played as opposites of another, one man willing to break the rules, the other wanting to stay within the letter of the law, until both sides come to terms with how the other sees things. And what’s very important to note is that Chan and his men aren’t ‘dirty cops’. Sure, they tamper with evidence and steal money from Po, but the end justifies the means in their minds. We also see them interact with loved ones and family members to further the point that they’re decent people.

Po is a decent person as well, being shown as a devoted father and husband, and a protector of his own people. In an early scene of the film, we see a confrontation between Chan, Kwun, and Po, where Chan makes a young punk walk barefoot over broken glass, taking the situation a little too far, and Po himself intervenes.

The film itself doesn’t have a lot of martial arts sequences to really qualify in my mind as a martial arts film. It’s a drama with fighting. Donnie Yen served as the fight coordinator of the film, and it’s what you’ve come to expect from him; solid choreography, speed, and nothing to push the envelope. The fights are also jammed in because of Yen’s involvement in the film. The producers even gave more financing to add the final fight and one about midway through after Yen agreed to do the movie. The fight scenes themselves appear to contain little to no wirework, and for a man his age, Sammo Hung can still move pretty damn good.

The acting and storytelling are what sell me on this film. Sammo Hung and Donnie Yen are both fine actors, and they’re doing their jobs very well, but I’ve always felt Simon Yam was terribly underrated. His character’s journey is the one you really pay attention to, and it wouldn’t be half as good a film where he not in it.

3 out of 4

reviewed by Seth Moore