Wendy Ide 

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In review – Hong Kong neo-noir that’s as entertaining as it is violent

Set in Kowloon’s treacherous 80s gangland, Soi Cheang’s no-holds-barred action thriller pits a bare-knuckle refugee against a cackling bad guy
  
  

Tony Wu wielding a giant machete, slicing into the back of another young man holding a knife
The ‘vigorously wince-inducing’ Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. Photograph: Publicity image

Set in the murkily atmospheric underworld of 1980s Hong Kong, wildly entertaining, eye-poppingly violent triad martial arts flick is an old-school throwback to the action cinema heyday of the territory. Chan Lok-kwun (Raymond Lam) arrives in HK as a documentless refugee and immediately attracts the attention of all the wrong people when he wins a bare-knuckle fight in a ring filled with shattered glass (the fight sequences are vigorously wince-inducing).

Fleeing with a stolen bag of drugs, he finds himself in the notorious Kowloon Walled City, a semi-derelict Chinese enclave that is the domain of tough but fair gangster Cyclone (Louis Koo). Chan becomes the target of a cackling maniac of a bad guy who can defy the laws of physics and wears outfits so terrible that they probably class as hate crimes.

  • In UK and Irish cinemas now

Watch a trailer for Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.
 

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