As a parallel to the community of the Hong Kong territory in the 1980s, the walls of Kowloon City, the one-time densest populated living area in the world, served opposing purposes. To keep out and to keep in; to bridge divides equally as to rupture connections. An endless inspiration in media as an enclave in which culture can evolve independently, featured in the spread that encompasses manga, video games, painting and literature, it now marks the second-highest grossing domestic film in Hong Kong’s history.
Raymond Lam’s Lok leads Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, the first in a proposed (and greenlit) blockbuster martial arts trilogy by Soi Cheang. A runaway refugee, desperately seeking board and security, finds himself under the support and practical tutelage of triad leader Cyclone (Louis Koo). He bonds with a small cohort of three other younger generational action talents to defend the sanctuary of the Walled City from the threatened invasion of Mr. Big (Sammo Hung) in a series of combative and political face-offs that turn familial, and thoroughly personal.
Twilight of the Warriors kicks off with an initial fight that may be its best, a multi-various cat-and-mouse chase with Lok on the run using every possible element at his disposal – yanked metal rebar slams into wood, scaffolding wrenched apart with makeshift blades, human beings thrown into concrete like CGI monkey limbs. What could be easily mistaken for vibes is Cheung Ka-fai’s seamlessly done edit job, choreographed between cuts and music, a balanced display of frenetic weaponry language that spontaneously creates new words.
It is immediately apparent that Twilight of the Warriors has two amazingly large graces, the second its inspiringly recreated production design work. Modeled after the original architecture, torn down in 1993, every lived-in detail about Cheang’s sets feel less as practical as they do authentic. Glances of printed copy, taped art and store shop advertisement go by while characters leap and fall between awnings and onto telephone wire, yet Cheang keeps a steady-enough alley-aligned view to give a sense of encampment that could never have been built overnight. The residents of Kowloon wear rags and garments in equal measure in a land where there is no outside, only the reconfiguration of value inside.
To make all of this out of Cheang’s aesthetic is entirely the point – to standalone, Twilight of the Warriors is book-ended by chapters of beginning and end to Lok’s journey, a sized-down epic that brings peasant into the coincidental alignment of civil royalty. This is the sort of drama that Westerners will easily align with Star Wars-types – a greater evil defeated, another protégé of said evil taking its place, the cycle continuing in formal ‘unrest’ fashion until the old guard is killed off, leading the way for a new guard to inhabit their trauma.
Tale as old as time, but for the modern Hong Kong (and broader Chinese) audience, Twilight of the Warriors hearkens to a stubborn desire, the kind that consciously fights in support of forgotten art. By the final climatic clash of Twilight, which draws on its protagonists to problem-solve their way out of a villain grown to American superhero-levels of untenable malevolence, Kowloon City has been in and out of beleaguered rule, torn between bureaucratic guards that all seek to support their own in a sanctuary bent keenly on living free from marginalization.
The cycle of evil self-perpetuates the cycle of good, as will the cycle of art and artists keep boosting Cheang and his contemporaries who want to put in the good effort to make an homage to cultural institution. Therein lies the philosophy of the once towering walled-complex – the sun never set on its story because it never organically rose there to begin with.
Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park
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