#specialid

Special ID http://www.icflix.com/eng/movie/hfpbhfq1-special-id #SpecialID #icflix #AndyOn #TianJing #DonnieYen #ClarenceYiuLeungFok #ClarenceFok #ActionMovies #DramaMovies #CrimeMovies #ChineseMovies #ChinaMovies #ChineseActionMovies #ChineseCrimeMovies #MixedMartialArtsMovies #MMAMovies #PoliceDetectiveMovies #TriadMovies #MandarinMovies #CantoneseMovies #HongKongMovies

Who doesn’t love a good martial arts flick? Donnie Yen has brought us plenty of awesome action films, from IpMan to WuXia to SPL, that are thrilling, with relatable and interesting characters. In Special ID, his latest martial arts movie, he shows off more of his fighting skills, this time utilizing the martial arts style he claimed he was most adept at. How then, did Special ID fall so far from glory?

The first problem with Special ID is the deceiving publicity. The trailer was violent, with Donnie showing off some seriously bloody and hard-hitting action. He even had blood all over his face in the poster, thus I was expecting a gritty Hong Kong gangster flick, but Special ID LIED, turning out to be an action-comedy. If the film had publicized itself this way, it would’ve ended up fine, however, lying to its audiences that it would be a violent crime thriller only made us angry and I couldn’t believe its guts as the movie went on.

Action-comedy? Fine. But Special ID didn’t even have the decency of delivering a proper plot. It was as if the filmmakers filmed the action sequences first, then formulated some crappy story to weave the scenes together. As a result, the plot is convoluted and nothing interesting really happens. I’m not even going to summarise it as it made no sense and only annoyed me as the ‘twists’ surfaced time and time again. Characters were also uninteresting, with a self-indulgent and disappointing performance by Donnie Yen and a cringe-worthy romance forcefully squeezed into the plot for the sake of it.

Consequently, due to these severe shortcomings, the film fails to inject any kind of suspense when it came to the fighting sequences. I suppose they are well crafted, but I was too busy questioning Detective Chen’s stupidity and the jarring loopholes in the story that the fights didn’t capture my attention. Fight scenes are only exciting and suspenseful when you have established an emotional connection with the characters at hand, just like how you probably clenched your fist when IpMan laid the final punches on the general in Ipman. The fight was awesome, because you cared about IpMan.

It doesn’t even matter if my mandarin is sinfully bad, cause I know a rubbish movie when I see one and Special ID is a waste of time by any standards.