Lip pau hang tung

CHEETAH ON FIRE (1992) is a by-the-numbers thriller about government agents tracking down an errant arms dealer, culminating in a raid on the arms dealer's outpost in the southeast Asian jungle. The action is mostly gunplay but is enlivened by some solid kung fu action performed by hero Donnie Yen and a quartet of memorable villains led by Gordon Liu and including Ken Lo and western martial artists Michael Woods and John Salvitti. The highlight is a fight between Donnie and Gordon (of MASTER KILLER fame and tons of old-school kung fu films), representing two generations of kung fu stars. Also on hand are Carrie Ng and Cheung Man, who are very good at looking pretty, but not so good at fighting. (Carrie's red lipstick lights up the jungle in every scene she's in.) Donnie Yen plays an American, which prompts the others on his team to call him `Foreigner,' one of the few times his actual nationality is acknowledged in a Hong Kong film.

The producers of "Cheetah on Fire" probably got together and said "Let's make a movie with Donnie Yen, a lot action and fight scenes, and some sex; all we need now is a plot and some music to go with it". The result is an awfully bad movie. Of course, one should not expect a lot of realism from the fighting scenes of HK action movies, but the ones in this movie were so gratuitous, confusing, and boring that even fans of the genre will be disappointed.

In Hong Kong, a weapon dealer has a special computer chip, which is needed to build a secret missile. He is trying to sell it to a foreign goverment. The local secret police, the CIA and an enemy band is looking for him, but he has a very rich and influential man as his partner.

Not as bad as some reviews suggest. It's a well-paced Hong Kong actioner with a good cast and an interesting enough story, though the narrative gets buried amidst the splendid action sequences, which what drives this film. It's what makes it so watchable. Donnie Yen is in his bone-crunching form, taking on some bad hombres, however his character comes across unlikeable, arrogant and quite caveman-like in his approach to detective work. He beats up a gangster, trying to get some answers from him, instead of putting his little grey cells to the test, or use some guile.

It's a cop film masquerading as a spy film. The good cops are trying to transfer a criminal who holds the chip for nuclear missiles which other parties want. As he escapes from the cops, it is upto the good cops to track him down and stop him from selling the chip. When that doesn't happen, they still have to track down the one that is having the chip and giving enough men for Donnie Yen to kick and punch around.

The threadbare storyline is least of this film's problem as it has got everything a low budget B-grade action film of the 90s must have right from the trashy dialogues to poor acting and over the top action along with barely surprising twists. Ofcourse there is lot of shooting and throwing of grenades too. There are two actors from the West who don't get to fight Donnie Yen and there's a third good guy who gets killed off soon. Apart from Donnie Yen factor, I just watched it to test my on tolerance level and I am happy to say, it is intact.

There is nothing in "Cheetah on Fire" that you haven't seen many times before (except for a bullet-removal during sex, perhaps!); the "attack on the villain's jungle camp" part that takes up the last 30 minutes or so has been done so many times it could evolve into a genre of its own. Script and production-wise, "Cheetah on Fire" is about on a par with a low-budget straight-to-video American action film starring, say, Dolph Lundgren; with that said, the execution does have a certain made-in-Hong Kong energy. I particularly liked the 3 women in the film: Cheung Man, Fujimi Nadeki, and Carrie Ng. They are all strong, fearless, and equal to the men in both giving and taking hits. Cheung Man, in particular, makes a great action heroine and it is unfortunate that she is written out of the second part of the movie. I also liked (once again) Michael Woods, who looks and acts like a comic-book creation (you could call him "The Black Hulk"). On the other hand, Donnie Yen fans will probably be disappointed, since he has very few fight scenes, the last of which (against Gordon Liu) is so often intercut with action happening elsewhere that there is no flow to it. (**1/2)