That was an excellent one.

Nice effects though.

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Aside from a few good Kung-fu sequences, this story of Hong Kong triad godfather, or da ge, Sammo Hung, and his feud with rival criminals inspires little emotion from the viewer. Rivalry within the triad plays out against a back-drop of half-assed cops who are usually a day late and a dollar short trying to catch the bad guys. The action rises and falls during the flick where we meet a strange assortment of murderers. One youngster with blue hair and a shock of over-sized bangs relishes dispatching his victims with a sword. We only hope someone puts him out of his bad-hair misery quickly. I'm sure the end was intended to arouse sympathy from the viewer, maybe even a tear or two was hoped for, but the characters arouse little emotion. We see them for what they are, cutthroats. When we see the "Tommy" character killed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, we are not moved by sorrow; there's no need for it here either. What were they thinking??

Fatal Move brings in new level of action in Hong Kong cinema. Cast is similar to that of SPL, and Sammo Hung and Simon Yam stars in this movie, this time working on the same side. The tone of the movie is similar to the one explored in the Infernal Affairs in that gangs will go to any extent to get their money, involvement between police and the gang is portrayed in detail, and deception plays a role in the story. What separates Fatal Move is the level of action and violence portrayed, and Wu Jing shows his fast and very beautifully choreographed move as the heavy in this movie. This movie to me is a ground breaking movie in Hong Kong action movie genre like Better Tomorrow did back in the '80s. While Better Tomorrow was somewhat mindless violence, this is violence with lots of intent backing it.The last fight between Wu Jing, and Sammo Hung was the only mindless battle, but if you have two such talent, you'd be remiss as a writer not to include this fight scene.Danny Lam plays the usual cop role, and Taiwanese actress Kelly Niu shows that she still looks great on the big screen.All of this brings good entertainment to this new age Hong Kong action movie. Highly recommended.

Written and directed by Dennis Law, Fatal Move was originally conceived as the prequel/sequel to 2005's SPL, which had Donnie Yen and Simon Yam pit their skills on the side of the law against triad members played by Sammo Hung and Wu Jing. SPL had an interesting concept to begin with, but I guess with the ending as it was (a cop out in my opinion), a successful sequel with an interlocking storyline with the surviving characters would prove challenging. A prequel on the other hand might not be as engaging, as if we were to see the rise of Sammo's character to triad boss status, it would ring too much a bell with Infernal Affairs 2.So Fatal Move offers a completely new storyline, albeit with most of the SPL main cast coming back for another go. Donnie Yen is absent (I'll see him in action later with The Empress and The Warriors), and Simon Yam crosses over the fence to star as the brother of Sammo's triad boss character Lin Ho Lung. However, Yam's Lin Ho Tung seems to be having a walk in the park (and in fact he really did!), as is Lin Ho Lung, because those itching to see some serious butt-kicking action by Sammo Hung, will have to wait until the last 10 minutes of the movie. There are plenty of Milkyway regulars here, with Lam Suet, Cheung Siu-Fai and Maggie Siu on hand to lend their heavyweight support to appeal to Westerners here who are familiar with their works, and Danny Lee returns after a long hiatus to play, what else, a cop yet again.The storyline is nothing to wow over, and most times seemed to be running on a railway track, completely fixed and one-way, chugging along almost endlessly, without a destination in sight. Character motivations were unclear, and Tien Niu as Lung's wife Soso really let it all rip in a melodramatic monologue that contains a lot more story in her words than all the dialogue put together in the movie. It's about the self-destruction of a triad gang from internal strife from the greed of man, but its central theme was touched upon in a rather haphazard, messy manner that you'd wonder if the sub-plots were just bookends for the action sequences.However, despite its title, Fatal Move is severely lacking in compelling action scenes. You have the tired car chases, and it seems that there was little effort in trying to milk what Wu Jing and Sammo Hung could do. They're martial arts exponents, but get to handle guns most of the time, and this does not exploit the skills they are trained with, which you can probably employ anyone to take over their place. Most of the fighting sequences were courtesy of Wu Jing, who's especially mean with his lopsided blue-dyed hairdo and an extremely sharp sword, but given no competent exponent character-wise to spar with him, it all boiled down to a one-sided affair. Seriously I'm a fan of his and I think it's about high time he takes over the starring role mantle for Chinese action movie stars, instead of getting bogged down playing side show villains.What gets compensated for the uninspiring action sequences, was blood and gore done in CGI. I'm placing my bets that Herman Yau, as director of photography here, would have added some of his own pointers in this aspect, and the camera does linger on in some of the more violent and gory aspects, such as pumping continuous lead into a body, and various forms of decapitations involving limbs and fingers, right down to a castration. The much touted fight between Sammo Hung and Wu Jing was the main draw for me I have to admit, but if you were to put SPL and this side by side, Wu Jing vs Donnie Yen had a lot more intensity and slick moves compared to Wu Jing vs Sammo Hung.But alas despite the M18 rating here, the movie was still subjected to multiple edits (originally rated R21 uncut, but no thanks of course to money-making distributors), and most of the gory bits couldn't escape the censor's scissors. What made it unforgivable, was that the much awaited duel too became victim, and for that, with the insipid storyline and relatively generic action, I would have to recommend that this be skipped at the cinemas, and rent the DVD if you're really interested.

There's no guarantee in life that another day means another dollar, but you can pretty much count on a new Simon Yam movie coming along. And here he is again in a triad story, but don't let the fact bring you down or put you off: this is actually a cool movie, marrying as it does serious underworld scheming with fantasy violence. It's kind of like the Infernal Affairs trilogy condensed and on crack.Fatal Move is a Category III for violence only – and it's indeed relatively bloody, even if much of the gore is cheap CGI. This is no Hostel, but nonetheless the body count is impressive and the range of physical outrages quite extensive, including one torture scene where Simon not only says it's pain time, but also does most of the inflicting in person.The result of all this bears some similarity to last summer's Invisible Target, although Fatal Move isn't as compelling or refreshing, nor are its characters quite as appealing. It also has crooks masquerading as cops, a raid on a police station and a SWAT/SDU team being made fools of, and does possess considerable talent – in addition to Yam, we get Sammo Hung and Wu Jing, both very capable performers, albeit not in their strongest outings here. This is especially true for Wu Jing, whose looney-aggressive act appears lifted directly from SPL, only not as sincere. Sammo gets very little time to show off his moves, yet does well as clan leader Lin Ho Lung, a veteran criminal who for once bothers with differentiating between "triad" and "mafia", a point rarely noted on the big screen.The story begins with Boss Lin celebrating the birth of his first son, and all's well – his deputies Ah Tung (Simon Yam) and Tin Hung (Wu Jing) seem to have things under control, while his female right hand person Soso (Tien Niu) maintains the books balanced and the money flowing in.This being a triad actioner, calm isn't the primary directive, and quickly things go sour as internal conniving and treachery become the order of the day on top of pressure from ever-present cops, led by Danny Lee as Inspector Liu, and with Lam Suet throwing in a cameo for some tragic-comic relief.Soon the choppings, sword slashings, bludgeoning and outright gunning down of cronies by the van load commence, accompanied by a rather convoluted string of double-dealing and treachery that affects all involved parties. Although this means the characters aren't totally flat and do have motivations, this facet of the story is left somewhat under-developed and thus results in mild confusion. As a consequence, the ending, which has a couple of supposed stunner-twists, fails to stuff the bucket, as they say, instead coming across as a bit of a red herring in fancy evening wear. This applies to many parts of Fatal Move – even at two hours it still feels cut in many instances, like they had to remove scenes at the last minute or something.Overall, Director Law (who did Fatal Contact before, also with Wu Jing) supervised a competent project here. This is a worthy addition to an already heavily populated herd of jiang hu flicks, and Fatal Move is all-told a memorable and visceral release that's unlikely to go down as a classic despite being a solid viewing with a healthy dose of both Election-like gangland politics and comic book hyperbole. We'd say go for it, it's one move you'll live to not regret.