Fatal Move Starring Sammo Hung and Simon Yam: A Review

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.