Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In (2024): A love letter to Hong Kong action cinema
Kowloon Walled City becomes a fitting backdrop for a spectacle that draws inspiration from King Hu, John Woo, Johnnie To and Jackie Chan.
Kowloon Walled City seems like something that could only exist in the imagination of science fiction writers. However, this claustrophobic labyrinth, one of the most densely populated places in human history, was a real place located in the heart of Hong Kong until its demolition in the mid 1990s. 35,000 people lived across just six acres with small apartments and businesses stacked on top of each other as many as 14-storeys high. It was also an infamous haven of criminal activity, largely ungoverned after it fell under triad control in the 1950s. If you are imagining Batman’s underworld of Gotham crossed with the cyberpunk dystopia of the video game Stray, you would be along the right lines; both of these fictional locations took inspiration from Kowloon Walled City.
Naturally, it makes the perfect backdrop for a crime movie in Soi Cheang’s Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In. We are introduced to Kowloon Walled City through Chan Lok-Kwan (Raymond Lam) who, like many of its real-life citizens, is an illegal immigrant who seeks refuge there to avoid deportation. He begins to work for Cyclone (Louis Koo), a martial arts master and de facto boss of the city. By turns magnetic and frightening, Cyclone protects the stability of his city with an iron fist. He and his closest allies (including Terrance Lau who plays Cyclone’s second-in-command and Tony Wu who plays his katana-wielding enforcer) become companions of Chan Lok-Kwan’s, and the group strives to keep Kowloon Walled City safe from internal disorder whilst external threats loom from other triad families looking to take control.
As tensions come to a head from forces both inside and outside of the city, the ensuing action plays out like a love letter to the past four decades of Hong Kong cinema. It mashes the supernatural martial arts of King Hu with the maximalism of John Woo, alongside the genre-bending playfulness of Johnnie To and the impressive stunt-work of Jackie Chan. In fact, two of these filmmakers were once set to co-direct the film back in the 2000s: John Woo and Johnnie To had lined up an all-star cast of their regular collaborators including Chow Yun-Fat, Andy Lau, Tony Leung and Anthony Wong, as well as a special appearance by Nicolas Cage. Talk about a Hong Kong cinema fan’s dream.
It’s an enjoyably dumb and cheesy spectacle, but one grounded by an authentic portrait of the anarchic culture of Kowloon Walled City, where lawlessness created a breeding ground for drug and sex trafficking but its tightly-knit community ventured to help one another through every hardship. Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In has also put a lot of effort into capturing the look and feel of the city. The film is shrouded in darkness to illustrate the way in which this towering structure blocked out almost all natural light (in fact, the novel it’s based on is called City Of Darkness, which is a far better and more appropriate name than the cumbersome one it has ended up with). Meanwhile, Kwok-Keung Mak’s vivid production design is one of the film’s highlights. It’s an excrescence of exposed cables and girders that wrap the crumbling structures like vines.
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Directed by Soi Cheang. Written by Au Kin-Yee, Shum Kwan-sin, Chan Taili and Lai Chun. Produced by John Chong and Wilson Yip. Starring Raymond Lam, Louis Koo, Sammo Hung, Richie Jen, Tony Lu and Terrance Lau. Entertaining Power, One Cool Film Production Limited, Sil-Metropole Organisation, Lian Ray Pictures and HG Entertainment. Distributed by Media Asia. 126 minutes. Hong Kong.