The heist has gone terribly wrong and now we
have a half dozen or so criminals in Fed-Ex jumpsuits running
through the streets in mainland China, desperately trying to
get away from about thirty cops who are chasing them.
The cops have guns, but they refuse to use them for some
reason. Eventually the cops get the majority of them
cornered, but all these criminals know Kung Fu and they are
really good at it. Now would be a good time, were I a
cop and I sucked at Kung Fu, to shoot them. But no,
these cops will wait their turns to get beaten silly and our
criminals will eventually get away. This is just the
start of what you will see in the unbelievable world created
by Dennis Law and his awesomely ridiculously stupid film of
grand entertainment value called 'King of the Triads'.
One of our gang members did get caught, that being Andy
(Siu-Fai Cheung), the leader of the gang and he was summarily
put to death. Apparently Andy left exacting instructions
to his sister Audrey (Bernice Liu) and his lawyer Peter (Suet
Lam) on what is to happen to the gang, but they can't read
these instructions until baby brother Jason (Lok-Yi Lai) makes
it back from the states. The assumption is that adoptive
brother Funky (Simon Yam) takes over the family, and any money
that Audrey and Jason might have coming should immediately be
turned over to the gang, and everyone is in agreement with
this.
Well… maybe not everyone. We're
just a little worried about gangster Calf (Andy On), the
scarred up bastard son of the family who is eternally
miserable. And in a gang that gets by on kicking ass, he
kicks ass the best which makes his miserableness all the more
concerning. Calf also has a young ingénue staying with
him in the mute Dumby (Luxia Jiang) who he has been training
in the ways of the ass-kicking, and the girl is quite the
prodigy. Our worries
about this agreement are confirmed as people
start dying super-fast. The lawyer goes belly up,
somebody blows up Jason… and while it started out that this
was going to be a bit of a mystery, clearly writer / director
Law saw this as a waste of time and just pretty much let us
know that it's Audrey that is killing everybody with her
half-brother Calf assisting.
One by one, the gang is dying, and in spectacular action
filled fashion. Audrey, who is an awful lot of fun to
look at while at the same time being flat out of her mind, has
a plan. That plan is to kill everybody, and we mean
EVERYBODY, and become King of the Triads. Damn if this
plan isn't working to perfection, but there is one little fly
in the ointment she didn't plan, that being, of course, the
mute Kung Fu artist bent on revenge. A showdown
looms. It will be anti-climactic.
To be kind, 'King of the Triads' or 'Bad Blood' as it is known
in some circles is a big old mess of a movie, which speaking
from a cinematic standpoint, ultimately makes it a bad movie…
but it is so over the top and so frenetic and so completely
insane for most of its running time, I'd be lying to you if I
told you I was not entertained by the nonsense.
What makes 'King of the Triads' a bad movie? While
Dennis Law the director has an undeniable visual flair, Dennis
Law the screenwriter isn't much of storyteller. The
basic story is simple enough, the big boss is dead and needs
to be replaced, and there are some good ideas floating around,
but there are far too many characters floating in and out of
this picture, pretty much all of them are poorly developed and
one dimensional, and the majority of them you have no real
idea who they are until it's time for them to die. The
narrative itself becomes almost cartoonish after a while,
elements appear out of the blue with no gradual introduction
and are almost dropped just as quickly as they either became
no longer useful, or the editor simply followed the directors
lead and cut it out.
Now I can neither confirm nor deny this, as this is just my
own personal theory, but I imagine once the filmmakers got
into the editing room they realized they had a mess on their
hands, they ditched all pretense of a murder mystery and just
turned this thing into an over the top action festival, and
the movie was better for it. About forty five minutes
in, the movie completely stopped relying on its story, which
was failing anyway, and just turned the movie over to Bernice
Liu and Andy On. The story doesn't improve much, it's
still fractured and fading in and out of plot points, but
Bernice Liu does sexy crazy real well and Andy On is one
heckuva an athlete and is about as much fun to watch fake
fight in a Kung Fu movie as anybody this side of Jacky
Wu. The majority of the fight scenes were pretty
ridiculous as well, particular the 1vs 100 extravaganzas, with
the one on one fight scenes being much better, but even those
were fun to watch.
'King of Triads', at least as far as I am concerned is yet
another glowing example that a movie doesn't necessarily have
to be good, to be entertaining.
