Review | Unleashed film review: Ken Low, Sam Lee star in boxing drama doomed by an implausible story
- A struggling gym owner’s protégé is crippled in a fight with a deadly opponent, revenge for a former trainee’s loss in the ring and jail term for drug crimes
- A superfluous side story and an inexplicable second boxing match cap off a film that looks good in places but is too illogical to engage viewers
2/5 stars
Another month, another disappointing boxing drama. After the Lunar New Year action comedy The Grand Grandmaster and last month’s overly melodramatic Knockout , Hong Kong cinema-goers must brace themselves for yet another forgettable dose of mediocrity in the shape of Unleashed, a movie so inadequately scripted its plot is almost impossible to summarise.
Written and directed by first-time filmmakers Kwok Ka-hei and Kwok Yat-choi, this trifle does offer a range of nice aerial shots of gritty Hong Kong neighbourhoods – an afterthought in most Hong Kong-China co-productions today. It also provides a rare leading part for Ken Low Wai-kwong, a former stuntman in Jackie Chan movies who has since developed into a solid supporting actor.
Low plays Debo, the financially struggling owner of a rooftop boxing gym and the martial arts teacher of Kit (Sun Zhenfeng), the reigning champion in the local underground boxing scene. Out of the blue, Debo is approached by former protégé, Lok (Sam Lee Chan-sam), to arrange a fight between Kit and Sholin (Zheng Ziping), a notorious boxer from Thailand known to have killed an opponent during a match.
They don’t realise that Lok is out for revenge – he got involved with drugs and spent eight years in prison after losing a match that Debo arranged for him once. But that doesn’t explain how Kit is so easily beaten by Sholin in the subsequent fight, and left paralysed from the waist down. And that’s just one third into this plodding movie.