Runtime: 98 minutes
Directed by: Le Van Kiet
Starring: Veronica Ngo, Mai Cat Vi, Thanh Nhien Phan, Kim Long Thach, Khanh Ngoc Mai
From: Quite a few Vietnamese companies
Good buzz since this was released two years ago plus this being foreign movie month meant that last night was the time to finally give this a shot. It's no The Raid by any means but for action films of the past decade from the Pacific Rim Asian region of the world, it was fine as I have seen worse.
The plot is simple... it's a mom and daughter, only she was formerly a gangland boss in Saigon and now she is a debt collector in a rural town-which provides nice scenery. Their relationship is rocky and daughter gets kidnapped, so mom tracks her down-and of course she knows martial arts. The plot at times has its ups and downs; some of the mom and daughter drama I did not love. Thankfully the action is more rock-solid and delivers the adequate amount of thrills that genre fans are looking for.
A big asset is the movie being anchored around the solid lead performance of Veronica Ngo, who in the duration acts both like a badass and a vulnerable mother. I understand she was in The Old Guard but gets zero fight scenes (lame) and was also in The Last Jedi... besides having no memory of that, let's not get re-litigate my thoughts on the movie! The aesthetics are nice, also: in the beginning it is a lovely rural village they are in... once they reach the big city, plenty of neon colors are shown. Organ harvesting is probably far overblown in terms of how often it actually happens... but it does make for good movie villains.
Naturally it does not reinvent the wheel; that said, it was a slice of action I did not mind consuming.
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