Also known as City With No Mercy and  Dou fo sin, Flash Point is a movie I’ve seen a few times. I got a screener copy while working at Wizard and unwittingly watched it a couple times and every time I’ve watched it, I’ve had the same thought: “Haven’t I seen this before?” But not in the way you might be expecting

I put the movie in tonight thinking it would be another Hong Kong action movie with too much plot and not enough ass kicking and I was right. What I didn’t realize was that I’d seen the whole thing before. As that would seem to indicate, the movie’s not very memorable. There’s a lot of cops and cops posing as mobsters and shooting and punching, but as far as interest goes, there’s very little until that last 20 minutes or so. But it’s well before those 20 minutes that make me think I’ve seen this movie before.

You see, there’s a scene about halfway through where there’s a big cookout at the undercover cop’s house. All his cop buddies come over for a good old time and bring him a fancy chair. But, it’s also an assassination attempt and the bad guys put a bomb in a turkey, blowing most of the people up, but only seriously injuring the undercover cop’s girlfriend. Oh no, not an innocent! That couldn’t possibly motivate an on-the-edge cop to do something over the line, could it? I swear to you, I’ve seen this scene before in an American action movie. For some reason I thought it was Chaos starring Jason Statham, Ryan Phillipe and Wesley Snipes, but I can’t remember that movie well enough to make sure. Does anyone recognize the scene I mentioned? IMDb and Wiki don’t say a thing about Flash Point getting remade.

Anyway, I guess the big deal about this movie is the final fight scene. If you’re expecting something out of The Protector or Drunken Master, don’t hold your breath. It’s a pretty cool fight scene, fantastic by American standards, but not much compared to something starring Tony Jaa or a young Jackie Chan (wow, that sounds snobby). Aside from his appearances in Shanghai Knights and Blade II (neither of which were all that memorable) this is the first Donnie Yen movie I’ve seen, definitely the first one he starred in. I wasn’t all that impressed. Yeah, the last fight scene traveling across a swampland was fun, but nothing mindblowing.

For the most part, I’m a big fan of the Dragon Dynasty series from Genius, of which this is a part of. I guess it’s still going strong even though it’s been a while since I’ve really paid attention to what they’re putting out. The line introduced me to the first two Police Story movies which blew me away with their awesomeness (best action/comedy ever?) and some others that have been fun to watch along the way. I’d love to get reacquainted with them, so if anyone at Genius is paying attention, I will watch every movie you send me and give you my honest opinion. What a deal!