“…features practically nonstop, balls to the wall action scenes…”

Flash Point is an action film that takes place in Hong Kong circa 1997. The film follows Inspector Jun Ma, a tough as nails cop who plays by his own rules (often times giving criminals serious injuries before he arrests them) as he tries to take down three brothers who are high level drug dealers. Jun’s partner, Wilson, has infiltrated the brothers’ group and is waiting for the signal to pounce; until his cover is blown. To be completely honest with you, I have a soft spot for action films. I’m not sure exactly why, but action movies just make sense to me. When I sit down and watch an action movie, I’m not looking for a great story; I’m looking for what was promised, great action. Lucky for me Flash Point delivered exactly this: a subpar story with outstanding action sequences.

Flashpoint doesn’t deliver anything new with the genre, in fact it is a very middle of the road movie in terms of story. You have the basic ‘One cop taking down the whole operation by himself’ plot and not much else. The beauty comes with the action scenes. What I love about Flash Point is literally every single person walking around knows karate. That means that never in this movie are you watching Jun hide behind a corner because he needs to reload his gun; he just bum rushes whoever he is fighting and they have a no holds barred fist fight. It is the greatest thing I have ever seen. It also works because Flash Point doesn’t use fighting as a crutch. Even though the story is nothing special, there is some down time in between fight scenes which allows the story to naturally progress to where it needs to go. One glaring issue I had with the film was the beginning. The movie starts off more or less at the beginning of the story, but you are (or at least I was) kind of thrown into the narrative and are left to wonder what is happening. I can say that I was thoroughly confused for about the first 20 minutes, but that gets better as the movie progresses. And the good part is that fighting doesn’t have to make sense; I would be perfectly happy just watching two dudes kick the shit out of each other for 90 minutes. The acting was pretty good, but again the focus of this movie is really the fighting so what I will say instead is that the choreography was really good. It was like watching a ballet at points the way people would be flying toward each other, executing punches perfectly. It was amazing. And I can’t forget to talk about the camerawork. See, the fights were well choreographed but it was the camerawork that allowed me to see how well choreographed they were. The way the camera followed the action (and there were even some beautiful shots mixed throughout) was amazing.

Overall Flash Point was a great movie, but it is not one that should be watched for the story. It features practically nonstop, balls to the wall action scenes; and for an action movie that’s all I could ever ask for.

I give Flash Point a B