Tiger Cage

If you ask most westerners what they know about Yuen Woo-ping they'll probably talk about his elaborately choreographed fight scenes in movies like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And for good reason; Woo-ping is one of the top martial arts choreographers in the world.

He's been around a long time, though, and he used to direct movies more frequently.  Tiger Cage came out in 1988 and anyone expecting a lot of flashy kung fu and wire-work is in for a surprise if they give this movie a whirl. It features absolutely savage violence—baseball bats, headbutts, knee-biting, gunshots to the face, and bonecrushing stunts. Why settle for just shooting a guy when you can shoot him, have him fall off a building and then land on a moving bus?

The first 15 minutes or so of Tiger Cage are an action junkie's delight; a drug deal gone wrong is busted by some trigger happy cops, and the resulting battle involves headshots, machetes, baseball bats to the shins, kung fu, running, jumping, climbing, and more shooting than a small war. It's insane.

The only problem with it is that it's so much nasty fun that it sets that bar for the rest of the film pretty high and then for a while Tiger Cage settles into being a gritty tale about drug dealers and corrupt cops.  There's some brutality, but the middle section of the film does sag a bit in comparison to the beginning.

Fortunately the movie recovers its footing towards the last third. While there aren't a huge amount of pure kung fu fights, Donnie Yen has great battle against a pair of foreign drug dealers (one is Michael Woods, who Yen would go on to fight again in several other Woo-ping movies such as Tiger Cage 2 and In the Line of Duty 4). Outside of that battle, however, there's still plenty of martial arts action; it's just mixed in with brutal streetfighting and gunplay. Once the action in the film picks back up it gets vicious and doesn't stop.

The movie has a great Hong Kong cast; in addition to Yen, there are folks like Simon Yam, Jacky Cheung, and Cynthia Khan. While the acting in the film isn't always first-rate—sometimes it veers into melodrama and cheesiness, and it's on much surer footing when it comes to anger and revenge—the plot is fairly entertaining.  You've most likely seen it all before, but you probably haven't seen it escalate to a final resolution the way Tiger Cage does.

No one's going to remember the story but the action is really good stuff; the stunts and sheer savagery of the fighting put most 80s movies to shame. Highly recommended to Hong Kong film fans that like extreme violence.