Unbeatable

激战

Hong Kong/China, 2013, colour, 2.35:1, 120 mins.

Director: Lin Chaoxian 林超贤 [Dante Lam].

Rating: 7/10.

Character-driven MMA drama is a return to form by Hong Kong director Lin Chaoxian [Dante Lam].

STORY

The present day. After a biking holiday in Yunnan province, China, Lin Siqi (Peng Yuyan), the son of a wealthy businessman (Gao Jie), returns to Beijing and bumps into an old friend, Chen (Wang Baoqiang), who is enjoying some conspicuous spending after his father died and left him a fortune. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, Hong Kong taxi driver Cheng Hui, aka “Scumbag Fai” (Zhang Jiahui), a former boxer and ex-con with gambling debts of HK$200,000, flees to neighbouring Macau and gets a menial job at the gym of old friend Taisui (Jiang Haowen). He rents a room in the flat of Wang Mingjun (Mei Ting), a Mainlander who has a 10-year-old daughter, Liang Peidan (Li Xinqiao). Wang Mingjun still suffers from depression, after a nervous breakdown when her husband left them for another women four years ago, and Cheng Hui slowly becomes attached to her and the mouthy Liang Peidan. Meanwhile, Lin Siqi has washed up, penniless, in Macau with his father, who has lost the will to live after being bankrupted by a stock-market collapse. Finding work as a manual labourer, Lin Siqi decides to enter the forthcoming Golden Rumble MMA Championship, which has a purse of HK$2 million. With some experience in taekwondo, he enrols at the same gym where Cheng Hui happens to work, in order to learn MMA. Lin Siqi also bumps into a former Mainland girlfriend, Keke (Li Fei’er), who tells him she now has a wealthy new boyfriend. After Cheng Hui by chance helps out Lin Siqi one night when the latter’s father turns violent, Cheng Hui agrees to help Lin Siqi with his MMA training, even though the championship is only 10 weeks away. However, Cheng Hui, despite being 48, also harbours a secret desire to compete for the prize money which he so desperately needs.

REVIEW

Everything that was wrong with The Viral Factor 逆战 (2012), the last movie by Hong Kong director Lin Chaoxin 林超贤 [Dante Lam], is right with Unbeatable 激战, a return to more atmospheric, character-driven action drama that he’s developed the past few years with films like Beast Stalker 证人 (2008), The Stool Pigeon 线人 (2010) and bits of Fire of Conscience 火龙 (2010). Eschewing the big-budget international antics of Viral, Unbeatable is largely set in Macau – beautifully captured in yellow-tinged hues by d.p. Xie Zhongdao 谢忠道 [Kenny Tse] – and for its action concentrates on mixed martial arts played out in a local championship, whose big purse both male protagonists so desperately need to put their lives back on track. Re-teaming with one of Hong Kong’s best actors, Zhang Jiahui 张家辉 [Nick Cheung] (the psycho in Beast Stalker and detective in Stool Pigeon), and hooking up for the first time with Taiwan’s fast-developing Peng Yuyan 彭于晏 [Eddie Peng] (Love 爱, 2012; A Wedding Invitation 分手合约, 2013), Lin has come up with two hours of totally generic but generally involving entertainment.

The script by Lin and regular writer Wu Weilun 吴炜伦 [Jack Ng] starts a bit bumpily with some gratuitous shots of scenic Yunnan and a Beijing sequence (featuring Mainland actor Wang Baoqiang 王宝强 as a comic nouveau riche) that only seem to be there to keep its China investor happy. Once the film settles down in Macau, it’s very much a Hong Kong movie in flavour, despite Peng speaking Mandarin and Mainland actresses Mei Ting 梅婷 (Aspirin 阿司匹林, 2006) and Li Fei’er 李菲儿 (Chongqing Blues 日照重庆, 2010; Somebody to Love 我们约会吧, 2011) taking supporting roles. As a depressive single mum whom Zhang’s taxi-driver lodges with, Mei doesn’t have much to do apart from look suicidal, and Li is basically pretty window-dressing as a former girlfriend of Peng’s character. Much livelier is 10-year-old Malaysian Chinese actress Li Xinqiao 李馨巧 (the daughter in Viral, and the snooty grand-daughter in the Malaysian Great Day 天天好天, 2011) who’s initially annoying as the single mum’s brat but gradually bonds with Zhang’s character in a meaningful and moving way, easily holding her own with the adults.

This being a Lin action drama, the main focus is on two male protagonists, here not on opposite sides of the law but brought together by the need for money to fix their lives and the need to win for personal self-esteem. The relationships and sub-plots are all totally formulaic (suffering single mum, beautiful ex-girlfriend, pushy kid, ex-boxer gone wrong, rich kid on the skids with a problem father to support), and the film could easily lose 15 minutes to its benefit. But it’s sustained by the acting of Zhang, who makes his middle-aged loser a genuinely shaded, believable character, and by the chemistry between him and Peng, which even gets away with them sending up the boderline homo-erotic aspects of the movie, with super-buff male torsos fulsomely on display. (In this respect, Zhang, 45, who trained particularly hard for the role, gives Peng, 31, a serious run for his money.)