Fatal Contact (2006)

Jacky Wu Jing stars as Kong, a national wushu team member lured into participating in an underground prize-fighting ring where the winners take home big money and losers go home in a body bag. FATAL CONTACT is an unusual low-budget actioner from writer, director and producer Dennis Law that strikes an uneasy blend of romantic comedy, exaggerated martial arts action and ultimately one very vicious and unsettling ending.

Kong quickly ascends to the top of the pack by fighting for his new girlfriend, Tin (pop singer Miki Yeung), and having support from Captain, a humble Tai Chi master (Ronald Cheng). As the stakes go up, Kong uncomfortably finds himself resorting to increasingly violent fighting moves to stay on top. When his promoter decides to back a new champion and cash in on the bets by fixing the fight, Kong refuses to cooperate until Tin gets involved. Kong has a painful choice to make but things are not what they seem and he ends up pushed to murderous extremes for the wrong reasons.

FATAL CONTACT is not your typical Hong Kong action movie. Writer-director Dennis Law starts out conventional and later moves into darker territory. It begins with slow-moving character development between Kong and his new girlfriend and between Kong and his new buddy Captain. They three pal around, do some training. In the ring, Kong effortlessly beats every opponent as his promoter and a rival, played by Ken Lo in a non-action role, continually raise the betting stakes.

Kong’s opponents range from ordinary rank amateurs to exaggerated characters out of a fantasy movie like BLACK MASK 2. There is a big and hairy Caucasian fighter (Paul Smith) in a leather vest who looks like a circus strongman. Andy On appears looking like a glam rocker with white highlights in his hair and a leather jacket. Donnie Yen protégé Kenji Tanigaki and Sammo Hung’s son Timmy also appear as more conventional opponents apart from the nails Kenji sticks in his shoes.

Martial arts action is similarly unreal in most cases with action director Nicky Li orchestrating wire-assisted spinning kicks and other exaggerated aerial moves. The fight sequences are very well choreographed given the limited time and money available. Highlights include Wu Jing’s match with Andy on where Wu applies a series of spinning elbow jabs and a wild match against KUNG FU HUSTLE co-star Xing Yu. So far, this is all pretty typical of modern Hong Kong action with a slight emphasis on drama. It accounts for about 70% of the movie.

Where things start to get strange is where Tin spends a disproportionate amount of time schooling her gal pal Chui Chi (Theresa Fu), a prostitute, on how she should be living her life. Is this a campy action movie or a serious drama or both? Meanwhile, you have Captain repeatedly performing superhuman displays of qi power as mere parlor tricks for his co-workers while behaving somewhat like Stephen Chow’s SHAOLIN SOCCER character. As for Kong, he is slowly being absorbed into ever-increasingly violence and becoming influenced by it. It’s a process that is essential to the understanding of the film but Wu Jing transformation isn’t highlighted very well.

Then you have one of the most unpleasant and morally dysfunctional endings to ever appear in a Hong Kong movie. I don’t want to spoil it as there is a twist involved but I will say that within a matter of seconds Wu Jing goes from being a bed-ridden, largely vacuous individual with little brains or drive beyond responding to his hormones in a childlike manner to becoming a rampaging mass murderer with the killing instinct and cruel efficiency of a seasoned assassin. It’s like Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER without the slow-boiling buildup and little sense of realism, style or meaning.

Despite a lack of commanding presence, Wu Jing is a very talented screen fighter who has done some excellent work in Chinese television, notably on THE TAI CHI MASTER. He also did quite well opposite Donnie Yen in KILL ZONE. In FATAL CONTACT, Wu Jing could have approached the role from a number of angles and been a success in the action sequences and the acting. Yet with the way Law has the story mapped out, Wu has few good options. His character has virtually no background or substance. There is no explanation of why, as a wushu stage performer, he has competitive sparring proficiency, although it may be implied that he has sanda experience.

As for his fighting, Wu Jing resorts to the kind of wire-assisted kung fu action that looks great in a period movie like FONG SAI YUK and looks like a joke in a movie like ROMEO MUST DIE. It’s no coincidence that I mention two Jet Li films when discussing Wu Jing’s action performance. Wu Jing is the closest thing that China has to a real successor to Jet Li and he still isn’t quite ready to step up despite this third starring role in a feature film. Contrary to Dragon Dynasty’s claim on their DVD cover art, his first starring role was in TAI CHI 2 in 1996. Part of the problem is Wu Jing’s lack of charisma. He moves like a kung fu star but doesn’t act like one. But in the case of FATAL CONTACT, it is Dennis law and Nicky Li who do not follow through. If the script had actually given Wu Jing the same attention it did Miki Yeung or if the choreography had pushed Wu Jing to apply his wushu with more distinctiveness, I think I would be coming to a very different and altogether more positive conclusion regarding this movie. As it is, FATAL CONTACT is only modest effort that’s not up to par with KILL ZONE but it still possesses some cool wire-fu fights, some twisted dramatic moments and a very grim ending that could have been positively mind-blowing if more thought had gone into the script. (As it turns out, according to Dennis Law in his audio commentary for the film, he had not yet decided on an ending for the film when he began working on it. This could explain what it comes a little out of left field.)

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Related Topics: betting, hospital, prostitute, sanda, tai chi, wushu