Yen plays Fok Zi Hou, the most badass police officer in all of Hong Kong. After a tough situation on the job, he leaves the force to further the pursuit of justice as a prosecuting attorney. But what he finds is a corrupt system full of compromise, indifference, and people who, shocker, aren’t nearly as committed to the cause as our boy Fok and are motivated by selfish aims. This is all personified by a case where a good, poor kid is railroaded into an unfair sentence and ground down by a bloated and easily exploited bureaucracy. So Fok must, as his steadfast conscience dictates, slice his way through the red tape, double-dealing, and, thankfully for the viewing audience, bad guys. (I don’t think most lawyers fight quite as much as Fok does here.)
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When The Prosecutor leans into the action it is, unsurprisingly, fantastic stuff. Working with his own team and frequent action choreographer Takahito Ouichi, Yen knows how to stage and execute a massive fight sequence, and there is some stunning work on display. We get a badass rooftop fight, an alleyway brawl where he fights a gang of DoorDash drivers, a parking garage chase/tussle, and a banger axe/machete fight on a subway. Top Tier stuff in that regard. Occasionally, the film gets a little too cute with the camera moves, swooping and sweeping with wild, unnecessary whips, but fortunately this tends to happen at the beginning of the action sequences, and they settle into a style that perfectly showcases the jaw-dropping martial arts acumen of those involved. They also embrace the grittier, street-style, MMA-influenced style of fighting that’s in vogue, favoring practicality over eye-catching aesthetic concerns.
When it veers away from the action, however, things don’t fly quite as high. The legal drama is tepid at best and is little more than a platform for Fok to pontificate and expound on high-minded ideals of justice and how their job is not to convict the accused, but to find the truth. He falls into the category of protagonist who is too perfect and totally without flaws. He’s idealistic, principled, utterly immune to any whiff of corruption or impropriety, and is stunned at every turn that everyone in the government doesn’t share his enthusiasm. Except for when they do—for as much as he rubs the higher ups the wrong way, his zeal often wins him allies. He even has a saccharine save-the-cat moment with his father who’s battling dementia and shows up out of nowhere for one quick scene and is never mentioned again.
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This portion plays tired and rote and is why the run time balloons up to almost two hours. During the many courtroom and office scenes the pace plods along while Fok orates and the accused kid looks sad and scared. Thankfully, his investigative cop brain is still in play and pushes him into situations that require an ass beating or two. As things start to move, finally at around the 50-minute mark, the momentum picks up and stays up for the back half. Yen’s breezy charm can carry the film through some of the down turns, but there are times when it’s a slog. He also has a series of wacky, legal-themed mugs (one simply reads, “I rest my case,” in plain black font on a plain white background) that play a weirdly prominent role throughout, which is an odd flourish.
When The Prosecutor lets loose and is content to be a badass action movie, it delivers the goods. There are reasons aplenty why Donnie Yen is a huge global star and they’re all on display here; he has the charm and the chops and routinely drops bangers for us to enjoy. Everything else, unfortunately, is toothless and bland. Julian Cheung has a few nice moments as the personification of Fok’s issues with the system, in a banality-of-evil sort of way, but it’s not much, and shoehorning in the capital-M Message trips things up. All of that said, it’s still well-worth watching to gawk at Yen and company throwing down in various locales. [Grade: B-]
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