Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

I didn't make it to Hong Kong til 1994 so this famous Kowloon walled city had already gone but it's legend hadn't. It was the equivalent of a large block of properties, within properties - a mass of alleys, corridors and tunnels in which the law was enforced in a very different way from the outside. This story starts with a battle that sees control pass from "Jim" to "Cyclone" (Louis Koo). There's now a truce of sorts that exists between the bosses and the outside world, but that's about to be thrown into turmoil by the arrival of "Lok" (Raymond Lam). He works hard to get an official ID card but is fleeced by "Mr. Big" (Sammo Hung) and escapes with a bag of his cocaine into the walled city. That's where he encounters it's ruler and his side...

I remember flying over the Kowloon walled city when I first visited Hong Kong in 1987. I distinctly remember the drab cramped spaces and the washing fluttering like multi coloured flags, hanging from grimy windows. Until then, I had no idea people could and did, live like this.

Twilight of the Warrior: Walled In takes its cue from the graphic novel to re-create the environment inside the walled city. A city which was, in essence, a self governing city, withing Hong Kong city. Unsurprisingly, criminal gangs vie for supremacy in the walled city. This story focuses on internal conflict within the controlling gang, triggered by the arrival of a newcomer with a past shared by the gangs leader. A situation taken advantage of by an external gan...

I want to give this movie a higher rating for the historical aspect but the supervillain is just so ludicrous that he ruins the climax. From the moment his superpower is revealed, it starts going downhill because it becomes very apparent that in order to wrap up this story they're gonna have to come up with an utterly ridiculous solution to the ludicrous problem, and that's exactly what they did.

I enjoyed the majority of this but I feel like I just wasted two hours because the climax sucked.

Contrary to one of the other reviews here, I'm gonna say that the plot is not at all complex and certainly not so complex that an English speaker can't follow it. It's nothing we haven't seen before in an Asian crime thriller. The only bit that m...