The Brink

[hotsake]

There is a lot of good action and fight scene here, the pace is well maintained and the tone of the film is well maintained. There are three main story thread in the movie two of which were good. First we have the story of a disgraced cop looking for redemption by stopping the criminals involved in his disgrace, the there is the thread concerning an up and coming Thug and his gang that want to make it big, and finally there is the completely unnecessary thread concerning Tung and the daughter of a criminal he had adopted years before. This is a gritty crime drama that tries to SPL with elements of South Korean gangster films. The film is filled with melodrama, shootouts and lots of fights, not all of this works but it never gets boring. The scenes with the adopted daughter drag the film down a bit but they’re never that long. The acting is pretty solid, Zhang Jin & Shawn Yue do good jobs and sell the martial arts scenes well. Yasuaki Kurata makes an appearance a few times but is underused. As I have said the fights are brutal and well done for the most part, some of the camerawork during the fights are a bit distracting.