Metacritic-Rezensionen

While the end result, now directed by Soi Cheang (“Mad Fate,” “Limbo”), may not be quite as deliriously over the top as that version might have been, it’s nevertheless a solid entry in the ledger of Hong Kong crime sagas and was a huge hit when released in China earlier this year.

Twilight of Warriors is one of the best action films of 2024 and one of the best martial arts films in recent memory.

Set in the murkily atmospheric underworld of 1980s Hong Kong, wildly entertaining, eye-poppingly violent triad martial arts flick is an old-school throwback to the action cinema heyday of the territory.

It’s both an elegy for, and triumph of, Hong Kong genre cinema.

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is a more conventional outing, hemmed in by its multi-generational plot and sentimental twists. But you will not want to miss its action scenes, staged within phenomenal settings.

It’s historic, set in Kowloon’s long gone but infamous high rise “walled city” slum, and between the over-the-top action, deadpan underreactions and silly supernaturalism, it is laugh-out-loud funny

Soi Cheang richly draws the city as both prison and refuge, where brutal exploitation sits alongside the residents’ deep sense of solidarity and cooperation.

Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is also probably the best comic book adaptation you’ll see this year, featuring a murderer’s row of Hong Kong stars like Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok and Sammo Hung, and featuring the sort of intricate maximalist production design that puts most other blockbusters to shame.

Much of that war is waged with a combination of fists, feet, blades and assorted ironmongery; people are routinely hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, and the athleticism and fight choreography is impressive, even if the action is edited so frenetically that it’s almost impossible to follow.

Its martial arts spectacle is scattered across a sprawling refugees-and-triads saga that, while adequately laying foundation for the aforementioned fisticuffs, is seldom coherent or engaging on its own.