Don't Give a Damn
3/25/2001
Review
Format: VCD
Stars: Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Ngai Sing, Robert Samuels

Sammo, Biao, and Takeshi are officers cracking down on crime and have some emotional sideshows as well.

I have owned this VCD for over a year now and I finally got to WATCH it. Believe it or not, the Universal Laser disc doesn't play in PCs, you need an actual VCD player, which I just bought today. I'm impressed with the movie, even though action isn't all over the place like I'd expect from a Sammo/Biao film. However, there are some very nice moments, with a gigantic finale. In addition, Sammo seems to have directed this, and the camerawork is fabulous, much different than his older films and better than his newer stuff. The action is choreographed very VERY well... anyways, I should explain before I go on.

Sammo and Takeshi are checking out a scene, and they're found by the criminals. Sammo does some good stuntwork here, some falls and good maneuvers to get through the garbage, and Takeshi surprised me with his agility, he's able to get around pretty well, throwing himself between bars and does a front flip from high up to avoid getting hit by a big truck. Sammo does a cool move where he gets hit by a truck and goes flying, but he does it by standing on the front bumber in the next cut and jumping off, not noticible until you put it in slomo, good idea. Takeshi takes on a couple guys with some standard kickboxing, and so does Sammo. Takeshi's part is longer here and he does a cool move where he jumps through a car door window when the door is open. Not an amazing scene or anything, but pretty good for modern stuff.



Biao gets a scene of his own where he beats up some street punks. He's standing on a table in the beginning and gets thrown over a telephone booth. Whether or not that was him I don't know, but the guy took a good fall. Not much kickboxing but Biao is fierce. It's about 30 seconds long.



Biao and Sammo fight in a locker room and do some brawling, throwing eachother around. Some spurts of kickboxing among the wrestling moves. Biao tries to carry Sammo at one point and just falls on a bench, and Sammo throws Biao all over the place, with someone (if not Biao) doing a nasty fall on the ground. Again, not a whole lot of kickboxing but some good funny stuff. About a minute 30 long.



Then there's a 4 minute long scene of Sammo and Takeshi fighting off some fake swat (-esque) members inside a storage place. Ngai Sing is one of them. Most of this is just the good guys getting shot at by the bad guys because they don't have enough ammo, same old thing. Sammo gets nailed by Ngai Sing, but no kickboxing is prevalent. Ngai gets away at the end of it by pummelling over a fence and jumping into a moving van. Something I've noticed about Ngai is that he's able to do anything as a villian. He does all his own stuntwork, and for someone his height (I imagine he's over 6'2) that's pretty amazing. Look at Billy Chow, that guy gets doubled for half the stuff he does, but Ngai does his own stuff, like front flip falls in The Red Wolf.



The finale impressed me, it's long and has quite a bit involved. Yuen Biao comes first and fights 2 white kickboxers, one of them is the white guy from The Red Wolf and the other is Kenny G (or whoever). I don't know if Biao was doing his own stuff, but whoever it was did a lot of falls with the scaffoldings and junk laying around. The two white guys can kick fairly well, but the long haired guy is just bad looking I think, he bobs around like a rubber duck and his punches are weak. The other guy is stiff. Really Biao is the only reason to watch this scene. In fact you might get angry at the other guys. Later Sammo's real-life sons come in and fight the two guys with crutches which is more interesting. A lot of this scene is spaced out kickboxing, a lot of it being little pauses where Biao recovers from a fall or the other guys do something stupid like accidentally hit a steel beam.



Then Takeshi dodges some guy who has a sword. I wonder why Sammo had him do this. It's not impressive at all really and Takeshi has nothing going on for himself except getting beaten.



Finally, Sammo's fight. This is the cream of the movie, almost totally worth the price paid. He first fights Robert Samuels, who is a black guy and (from what I hear) trained to be a screen fighter under Sammo's direction. The two of them are fast, lots of kicking combined with good punches. Samuels is good but whenever he talks it's annoying, he has no useful dialogue. Who's fault was this I wonder? More fast kickboxing from them and then Ngai Sing makes a powerful entry breaking through a window from above right in the middle of the fight and fights both of them, which then turns into a 3 way bout. Very well done work, I could tell this was done by Sammo. Ngai Sing seems to top them both with speed and that's why he wins, Samuels throws some ok kicks, and Sammo takes a dive through a little duct. This all lasts for about 2:30, impressive for such a display.



Even though the only great part of this movie was Sammo's finale, there were other good scenes. Biao's finale was cool, and their fight in the locker room was good too. However, this feels like an incomplete film, like they forgot to add a character or a fight. The story is boring (I haven't watched it fully through once yet, just another cop movie really), and the colors are SO DRAB, all grey and white and black, occasionally a shade of red or blue if we're lucky. In all I'm glad to see a movie like this come at such a time (1994 if I'm correct), plus Biao was in great form here. Not slow or anything. There were some racial jokes but who hasn't heard those? But it could have been more.

3/5

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