SPL: Kill Zone (2005) Review: Bone-Crunching Hong Kong Noir

Is SPL: Kill Zone worth watching?

Yes, above all for its fights. SPL: Kill Zone is a grim, hard-hitting Hong Kong crime thriller whose two big martial arts showdowns are still benchmarks for the genre. Wilson Yip pairs Donnie Yen’s ferocious choreography with a doom-laden cop story, and casting Sammo Hung as the villain was an inspired stroke. The drama between the action is another matter: overwrought, schematic and often less gripping than it thinks it is.

What is SPL: Kill Zone about?

Chan (Simon Yam) is a senior detective close to the end of his career who has spent years trying to bring down the ruthless crime lord Wong Po (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo). His team is also caring for the young daughter of a witness Po had killed, and their frustration has made them increasingly willing to cross lines to get their man. Into this pressure cooker comes Ma (Donnie Yen), a martial arts expert set to take over the unit when Chan steps down.

SPL: Kill Zone is directed by Wilson Yip, a Hong Kong production in Cantonese that runs a lean 93 minutes and was released in November 2005. The cast also includes Wu Jing, Liu Kai-Chi, Danny Summer and Ken Chang Tzu-Yao. The initials in the title come from its Chinese name, Sha Po Lang, which refers to three stars in Chinese astrology.

Two fights that justify the whole film

The reason SPL has lasted is its action, and two sequences in particular. The first pits Donnie Yen against Wu Jing as a knife-wielding killer in a narrow alley, Yen armed with an extendable baton. It is fast, vicious and completely legible, a duel in which every strike reads clearly and the danger of the blade is always present. Yen, who also handled the choreography, blends traditional kung fu with grappling and a harder, more modern impact style, and the fight still looks startlingly fresh.

The second is the much-anticipated confrontation between Yen and Sammo Hung. It is enough to say that it delivers on the pairing: two veterans of very different builds and fighting styles, filmed with the clarity that later Hong Kong action often lost to rapid cutting.

Sammo Hung as a villain

Hung is best known for playing likeable heroes and comic brawlers, so casting him as a calm, merciless gangster gives the film an undertow of surprise. He plays Po with a quiet, almost domestic menace, a family man who orders murders without raising his voice, and his physical presence makes every scene he shares with the police tense. It is one of the most memorable performances of his later career.

Simon Yam matches him on the other side. Chan is a man consumed by his crusade, and Yam plays him with a weariness that makes the film’s moral questions, about how far police should go to stop a criminal they cannot touch legally, feel more serious than the script sometimes does.

Melodrama that weighs it down

Between the fights, SPL is a heavy, sometimes clumsy film. The plot relies on coincidence and on characters making choices that serve the tragedy rather than logic, and the sentimental subplots involving children and families are laid on thickly, with a mournful score underlining every beat. Donnie Yen, despite top billing, is underused as a dramatic presence; Ma is more a force of nature than a character. The overwhelming fatalism of the storytelling will strike some viewers as powerful and others as punishing. Where it lands for you will shape how much the film works beyond its action.

Who should watch SPL: Kill Zone?

It is essential for martial arts fans, for admirers of Donnie Yen’s choreography, and for anyone curious about how Hong Kong action reinvented itself in the 2000s. At 93 minutes it is compact, but it is not light entertainment: the violence is bloody and bone-crunching, the tone bleak, and the story involves the murder of witnesses and threats to children.

Where to go next:

• Infernal Affairs, for the more elegant, cerebral side of Hong Kong cop-and-gangster cinema.
• Hard Boiled, John Woo’s operatic police thriller, for gunplay rather than fists on the same scale of excess.
• Police Story, Jackie Chan’s landmark cop action film, for a lighter, stunt-driven counterpart.

The verdict

SPL: Kill Zone is a flawed film with two great sequences and one inspired piece of casting. Its melodrama is heavy and its plotting creaky, but when Donnie Yen squares up to Wu Jing or Sammo Hung, it becomes one of the finest Hong Kong action films of its decade.

Rating: 3.5/5