Hunted Hunter
Director: Ricky Lau
Year: 1997
Rating: 6.5
I came away from this film with a mixed
feeling - it comes nowhere close to Yuen Biao's best work, but there is still
plenty of action and it is generally entertaining even if very formalistic.
You sense right from the beginning that this movie will not be a classic
when you realize that the action is taking place in the Philippines and your
immediate thought is - "oh no, not a cheapo Filipino knockoff. Has the same
fate befallen Yuen that befell Cynthia Khan & Yukari Oshima". Well probably
- but this one is a few notches above some of those other low budget quickies
that I have come across.
The story has Yuen being framed for murder and sentenced to be executed.
He escapes and is basically on the run for the entire movie - looking for
the real killer while escaping from the police time after time after time
. . . At least the action soon shifts to HK and the quality of the film making
picks up immediately. Lots of action - none of it brilliant - but some of
it not badly done as a bit on bamboo scaffolding and the final shoot out.
There are a few stunts in which I wondered whether Yuen was doing them as
the camera shot was from quite a distance. I still remember two jumps he made
in Millionaire Express & On the Run that were breathtaking so I was curious
if he was making them in this film. Probably for a low budget job like this
he would not want to bother. The most irritating thing in the film is the
director resorting to doing some of the action scenes in slo-mo for absolutely
no reason that I can see. Hell, I can look good in slo-mo - I want to see
Yuen in real time speed (or even speeded up). Sometimes slo-mo is used effectively
for creating an atmosphere, being almost poetic - but here it was just done
for doing it. A film really only for Yuen Biao fans. Also in the film is
Jessica Hester, Wu Ma and Jerry Lamb.
