Donnie Yen is an immensely gifted action star who excels in the Ip-Man series, Hero, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But fans expecting thrilling set-pieces in his new film Raging Fire will be disappointed to learn that it’s nothing more than an unbearable cop drama so desperate to convince the audience that “not all cops are bad” that it forgets to tell an interesting story — or at least one that hasn’t been beaten to death a thousand times over.
Yen plays Cheung Sung-pong, a by-the-book police officer who’s looked down upon by his peers for following the rules and snitching on his fellow cops, leading to their arrest. Years go by, and guess who is back for revenge? His former coworkers, who had a hell of a time behind bars with the criminals that they put there. It may seem absurd that, in the world of this movie, an entire police squad would be imprisoned for killing someone — especially when, in reality, police freely use excessive force on protestors and hardly ever see jail time for murder — but the utter seriousness which with the movie portrays laws and procedure as a crushing force that hinders cops from doing their jobs is laughably unaware of what is currently happening in the real world.
When Raging Fire isn’t recycling cop film clichés and failing to pay them off (e.g. Sung-pong’s wife being pregnant throughout), Yen is constantly overplaying his character by flailing his arms and complaining that being a cop isn’t “black and white,” and that there are “gray areas.” I should mention that he says this after shooting at a bomb squad and endangering the lives of several hostages. Look, I’m not saying that an unhinged cop can’t be a protagonist; hell, Liam Neeson does it three times a year, but the film shoots itself in the foot by focusing on the law-and-order melodrama (with limited actors in that department) over the crime and action elements.
Despite all of the egregious copaganda, the movie’s worst sin is not delivering on the action potential of Yen. There’s no reason why a star of his caliber should be wasted via unimaginative gunfights and poorly filmed car chases. The movie contains only two standout hand-to-hand combat scenes: One comes about halfway through the film and features a Yen staple where he fights off an army of bad guys by himself, and the other is the final fight scene between Yen and his former partner, which will make you wonder why the film deprived the audience of action even close to that level for 100 minutes. The final public gunfight is a blatant ripoff of Michael Mann’s Heat — down to a character with Val Kilmer’s character’s hair, suit, and shades — but misunderstands that Heat respects its criminals and cops on an equal level. The tragedy in Raging Fire is that it can’t look past its self-righteous mythologizing of cops to make any character or element in the story worth caring about.
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