Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie Review

Expendable.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 7, 2014

A lot of jokes have been told about so-called “happy endings”, but there’s a different kind of happy ending at the core of the very noisy and busy, but only fitfully amusing, Badges of Fury. The film starts with an array of weird deaths (featuring a bunch of cameos which will probably only be recognized by true Hong Kong culture aficionados), where each and every victim dies with a smile on their faces. That odd but enticing plot conceit then takes a sudden back seat as the film segues abruptly to what appears to be a huge police sting operation that is taking place during a huge outdoor party where quite a few of the people, including some undercover cops, are in Scottish garb. Already wise readers may be catching onto the fact that Badges of Fury is played mostly for laughs, with interstitial action elements utilized to juice up the proceedings, something that’s probably wise since a lot of the manic humor tends to fall by the wayside, especially as the film continues on in an increasingly frenetic way. What is essentially a buddy comedy pitting a seasoned cop with an impulsive newcomer repeatedly tries to inject so much craziness into the stew that the film ends up sapping its own energy. In fact Badges of Fury often plays like one of those desperate stand up comedians who senses their act isn’t going over as well as might be hoped, and who simply becomes all the more insistent about it in the process, shouting jokes at the audience as if volume will automatically create humor. The film has a sort of disheveled look about it as well, as if it had been cobbled together willy-nilly, without too much forethought or planning. Jet Li proves to be an affable enough comedic presence, perhaps never quite at the level of, say, Jackie Chan, but certainly enjoyable enough, but it’s mostly at the service of a lackluster film that has a few giggles along the way but barely any belly laughs.

One gets the idea that scenarist Tan Cheung and director Tsz Ming Wong were going for the same sort of insouciant lunacy that populated the Naked Gun franchise (The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!), with supposedly sly, winking out and out references to Jet Li films like Fearless being bandied about during an early scene that is supposedly about video piracy (this scene also makes a brief reference to Men in Black ). But perhaps some of the verbal humor is simply lost in translation, which leaves the bulk of the comedy in Badges of Fury to some of the buffoonish physical humor which is given mostly to the younger cop Wang (Zhang Wen).

The sting operation mentioned above introduces us to Wang as well as his "elderly" partner Huang (Jet Li), both of whom are being managed (more or less, anyway) by Angela (Michelle Lee), who is communicating to the undercover cops from a hidden command center. Though they're evidently there to witness some kind of underworld deal and then to take the bad guys into custody, when Huang notices a long sought after kingpin enter the party, he reveals his impetuous nature by not following Angela's orders to stay in his place (which happens to be in a kilt as part of a Scottish dance performance), instead taking off in a mad scramble for the kingpin, which of course alerts the other bad guys that something is up, leading to rampant confusion and chaos (something this film tends to specialize in). Wang loses sight of the kingpin, but Huang manages to corner him in a huge staircase, where the two engage in a (literal) high wire duel. Even Huang's expertise can't reign the kingpin in, and ultimately the upshot of all this brouhaha is an epic damage bill and Huang, Wang and Angela being called on the carpet by their very unhappy superior.

That gargantuan faux pas leads the trio into the main part of the film, where they attempt to discover what’s going on with the glut of victims with smiles on their faces. That in turn leads them to actress Liu Jinshui (Shishi Liu), who, in a kind of reverse Bodyguard setup, has an even more glamorous sister, a voodoo doll possessing glamour-puss named Dai Yiyi. All of the dead men have connections to either Liu or Dai, and that affords the cops a good reason to start poking around in the women’s private lives, in the hopes that they can scare the murderer into actually taking action against them.

Alfred Hitchcock famously proffered the idea of a “McGuffin” (or “MacGuffin”), a plot device which has no intrinsic meaning but which provides motivation for much of what happens in the film. In the case of Badges of Fury, though, the entire plot is a McGuffin. Nothing ends up mattering in this film, which is basically a very flimsy foundation onto which a series of gags, send ups and occasional manic fight scenes are precariously balanced. Li is about to turn 51 and of course can’t be expected to blast through action epics forever (The Expendables notwithstanding), and so part of this film’s emphasis on Wen is understandable, but director Tsz Ming Wong and editor Angie Lam go to great lengths to cinematically dance around Li’s “presence” in several of his fight scenes, which may lead some cynics to conclude that there’s a fair amount of doubling involved.

Badges of Fury unfortunately never achieves much impact either as a buddy comedy or as a straight ahead action flick. There’s a curiously rushed feeling to a lot of the film, as if the creatives both in front of and behind the camera felt that if they simply got something on the screen soon enough, some sort of ineffable magic would ensue. Unfortunately, this is a case where, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there’s a lot of sound in this particular Fury, but it all still signifies next to nothing.

Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Badges of Fury is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Shot with the Red Epic system, Badges of Fury looks great on Blu-ray, with a sharp, precise image that offers some nicely saturated colors and excellent fine detail. That said, a lot of this film takes place in dimly lit or nighttime locales, and there is a relative lack of shadow detail in several of these scenes, as a cursory glance at some of the screenshots accompanying this review will show. A couple of scenes have also been fairly aggressively color graded in post (once again to the seemingly unavoidable blue end of the spectrum), which depletes at least a bit of fine detail from those sequences. There are no obvious signs of compression artifacts in this presentation, though, and overall this is a nicely sharp and clear looking transfer that should easily please the film's (and Li's) fans.

Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Badges of Fury features a quartet of audio options, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 mixes in both Mandarin and English. While the English 5.1 mix is virtually identical to the original Mandarin mix in terms of general ambience, foley effects and surround placement, my personal advice is to stay as far, far away from it as possible, unless you're absolutely incapable of dealing with subtitles. The dub here is so ham handed that dialogue literally continues long after lips have stopped moving at several moments throughout the film. The original Mandarin track is very well done, and features a bombastically immersive mix in the action set pieces that offers the typical bone crunching sounds emanating from the side channels with a fair degree of intensity. Dialogue is cleanly presented (though it's obvious in this "original" mix that at least some of the actors are dubbed), and fidelity is excellent. Dynamic range is also extremely wide, as befits this sort of action-comedy mash up.

Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of (480i; 26:13) includes:

  The Guys

  The Girls

  Wen Zhang Action Scene

  Funny Stuff

• Behind the Scenes (480i; 13:55) includes some interviews along with more typical candid footage.


• Trailer (1080p; 1:39)

Badges of Fury Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Maybe the biggest problem with Badges of Fury is that it tries too hard. This is a film that just keeps coming at the audience with more and more silliness, which ultimately becomes a case of overload. There's a goofily enjoyable ambience here, to be sure, but it's hampered by a sort of desperate intensity that undercuts the very lightheartedness the film is obviously aiming for. Li fans may want to check this out, but even they may be disappointed by this film's oddly lurching quality. For those who do want to check it out, the Blu-ray's audio and video merits are excellent.