Worse ways to kill a few hours. But not many.
Fist Power is neither a particularly good movie nor a particularly bad one. It's pretty much average in every way. From the plot to the action and even the acting.
The usually reliable Anthony Wong (The Mission,Infernal Affairs)continues his attempt to star in more movies than your average pornstar as Chiu, an officer based with the British army in Hong Kong. The movie opens setting up Chiu as one of those sympathetic villains by showing him as a family man who is treated badly by his ex-wife when she takes his son to live with her and her new boyfriend.
For a moment I thought that it may have been a rarity in lower budget HK action cinema where theres a 3 dimmensional villain character. Unfortunatley the plot is not strong enough to support such developments, and by the end he is for the most part painted as a psychotic madman. Any illusions of a gray area in the usually black and white world of heroes and villains is handled rather clumsily. It's almost patronizing the way they felt the need to make it more obvious to the audience that he was indeed the villain.
We are introduced to Cheuk (Man Cheuk Chiu) a security expert from the mainland who has just come to Hong Kong with his family. He crosses paths with Chiu but in a fairly amicable way at first... until on taking his nephew to school one day he finds Chiu has taken the school hostage in an attempt to negotiate custody of his son.
Being a security expert and having briefly met Chiu as well as having an emotional tie to the situation, Cheuk is inevitabley involved in negotiations to free the hostages. And so it goes. Add to the plot a love interest, some high speed car chases and some mediocre martial arts sequences and you have at best a fairly exciting thriller and at worst a martial arts thriller that fails to stand out from most other releases of the time.
The dissapointing thing with Fist Power is it has potential. Tony Wong is a good actor who could easily have pulled off the role with more meat had the script allowed it. A less cut and dry charicature of the villain may have added more life to the story, but thats not it's only fault. Since he was involved with the British Army I dont understand why they didn't take advantage of Wong's Eurasian background either, a role he played so well in Colour of the Truth. At times it's just way too cheesy and predictable and from someone like Man Cheuk Chiu who showed what he can do with good choreography in Blacksheep Affair and The Blade most of the fights are... well rubbish.
All in all not really recommended but if your a Man Cheuk Chiu fan better this than Body Weapon.
