Review of The King of the Streets (2012) by Said C — 22 Apr 2015

The King of the Streets is a pretty typical martial arts/action movie. The hero, Yue, is a street fighter with a past who killed someone during a fight when he was younger (never mind that the person he kills attacked him with a knife after about 20 other guys had also attacked him, I guess that's not enough for a lawyer to get him off by claiming self-defense). Eight years later he gets out of prison and wants to lead a nice quiet life, but finds that it's a bit hard to get work when you're an ex-con with a murder conviction.

After some random events, he ends up volunteering at an orphanage (along with Beck Li, which is a nice perk for him, as she's gorgeous and into quiet martial artists with shady pasts) and, of course, a gang wants the orphanage's property but won't pay the proper value for it. This forces Yue to defend the orphanage by using his street fighting skills, which he does... a lot... really, the bad guys should stop going to that orphanage, they just get their butts kicked. All pretty standard stuff.

The fights are really good. The last fight is quite the crazy affair, though I found myself wondering (as I sometimes do when one guy fights off 20+ enemies) why the bad guys behind him never bothered to hit him with the metal poles they were carrying, instead waiting for him to turn around before attacking... but that's pretty typical of these movies as well.

Then we get to the ending which is... well, odd. I'll try not to spoil anything, but I felt pretty let down by it all. The hero wins and the movie should end, but it doesn't for a few minutes while some actually very cool filming occurs and some real tension builds up. Had this been in the middle of the movie, it would have been great because it might be the best filming of the movie. Unfortunately, it's at the end, after the rising action and climax of movie; at this point, tension is supposed to be tapering off, not ratcheting up. Then it leaves us hanging about the fate of Yue while random text tells the audience about the "Legend of the Eagle." Really, it almost looks like a "to be continued" sort of scene, but I don't know that that makes sense with this movie (since ALL of the bad guys have been kicked into submission and Yue's life is pretty much just what he wants). Instead, it feels like a really cool idea that they couldn't work in anywhere else and just tacked onto the ending for no reason what-so-ever. I don't know that I've ever seen a more distracting scene at the end of a movie.

Ending aside, this is a solid, though maybe not spectacular, action movie. Beck Li is a little underused and one or two of the villains should have had some character development so they weren't just bad for the sake of badness, but it does a good job at all of the things a martial arts movie is supposed to do well... except that ending, ugh, the ending...