Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie Review

The hats are resolutely gray in 'Kill Zone'.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 30, 2010

One of the earliest visual tropes film established was giving black hats to the bad guys and white hats to the good guys. This imagistic shorthand allowed audiences to quickly identify for whom they should be rooting. As film matured, often the accepted symbols were tinkered with, often casting an ironic shadow on the original intent. Everything from Anthony Mann’s 1950’s westerns to more modern fare like Star Wars sometimes cast the baddies in white (Imperial Storm Troopers, anyone?) and good guys in black (Han Solo, anyone?). Of course, even irony only goes so far, and Star Wars’ primordial bad guy, Darth Vader, was a vision in obsidian. One is left to wonder what color hats the cast of characters in Kill Zone (originally entitled SPL: Sha Po Lang) would wear—if indeed, to paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, anyone still wore a hat—as the usual defining characteristics between good guys and bad guys are all but erased in this tale of rogue cops run amok to bring a Triad crime boss to justice. Kill Zone is a film of grays, where good and bad commingle equally in both the ostensible heroes and villains. The cops utilize one questionable tactic after another to bring Wo Pang (Sammo Hung) down, and Wo Pang himself, despite being largely despicable, is shown as being intensely vulnerable, especially with regard to his wife, who suffers a series of miscarriages before finally giving birth. This is most definitely not your typical Chop Socky spectacular, despite having its share of rambunctious fight sequences. Instead this is a fascinating character study that aptly depicts the sometimes disturbing mixture of good and bad which inhabits most people, whether or not they are policemen or gangsters.

Kill Zone’s two main cops are Chan (Simon Yam) and Ma Kwun (Donnie Yen). Chan is on the verge of retirement, after having failed repeatedly to keep Wo Pang behind bars. In fact the film starts with an interesting conceit, showing the devastation rained down on a prospective witness against Wo Pang, which leaves the witness’ young daughter orphaned. Chan of course takes her in. The film then leapfrogs forward three years to the eve of Chan’s retirement, when Ma Kwun is coming on board as the new cop on the beat. There’s the hint of a closed clique in terms of Chan and his fellow detectives, especially with regard to their questionable tactics, which include everything from planting evidence, destroying evidence and beating conspirators to death. Ma Kwun quickly figures out what’s really going on, and in one of Kill Zone’s unexpected plot developments, doesn’t posit himself as the virtuous protagonist, but instead joins in, albeit with misgivings, to further the police department’s attempts to frame Wo Pang for the murder of an undercover cop which he didn’t technically commit, but in which he was complicit.

Director and co-writer Wilson Yip spends a good deal of time setting up the characters and the plot machinations early in Kill Zone and indeed some viewers may be momentarily confused by what’s going on, until about a half hour to 45 minutes into the film. Then suddenly all hell breaks loose and Yip’s intentions are made abundantly clear. No one is firmly on the side of good and evil in this film, despite perhaps good intentions on the part of Chan and his cohorts. Of course the oft-quoted adage that good intentions line the road to hell is exactly what’s portrayed throughout Kill Zone, but time and again Yip undermines any sympathy the audience may feel for the police, and he does exactly the opposite at least a time or two with regard to Wo Pang. This sort of tonal ambivalence is completely contrary to what viewers typically expect from the comic book, white hats versus black hats ambience of a lot of Hong Kong martial arts epics. Kill Zone still preserves that comic book ethos, especially in the over the top fight scenes, but there’s a really remarkable emotional and even philosophical maturity to a lot of this film which makes it particularly unique in the annals of relatively contemporary Hong Kong cinema.

Performances here are outstanding down the line, from Yam’s tortured (and in fact torturing) Chan to Yen’s sort of quasi-“greaser” Ma Kwun to Hung’s blustering Wo Pang. The entire ensemble bristles with fine little character moments, and the fight scenes, co-choreographed by Yen, Yam, Hung and Wu Jing, are exceptional. We get a fun, if ultimately very disturbing, rooftop chase, which ends with the bad guy getting brutally beaten and thrown off a building by the police. Wo Pung is brought down in a free for all in a lavish building, where the furniture becomes nothing less than obstacles which slightly break a number of devastating falls.

Yip has become something of a cult item for his more recent Ip Man, but his directorial and even writing assuredness are still firmly on display in this earlier film. Kill Zone is a refreshingly bracing experience that takes a number of accepted stereotypes and then turns them squarely on their head. Audiences who are used to having heroes to root for and villains to hiss will perhaps be confounded by Kill Zone’s resolute refusal to permit easy answers. Unlike a lot of cartoonish martial arts films, Kill Zone never plays to the lowest common denominator and thereby refuses to pander to its audience’s supposed lack of sophistication. For once, the “cartoon” has some real depth and emotional nuance, and that makes Kill Zone a singular film experience that even those without a particular penchant for Hong Kong cinema should enjoy.

Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Yip filters a lot of Kill Zone toward the yellow and green end of the spectrum, and as such some viewers may think that the Blu-ray's AVC encoded 1080p image in 1.78:1 is off kilter. Those fears should be allayed when normally lit, unfiltered scenes come into view, scenes which amply convey excellent levels of fine detail, equally excellent saturation, and a pleasing level of grain. Some of the darker scenes have a fair amount of digital noise which wafts through the image and may be momentarily distracting. There are also some artifacting issues, including occasional shimmer, haloing and edge enhancement. Overall, though, Kill Zone looks nicely sharp, especially in the brightly lit exterior segments. Even the filtered work, which sometimes casts the faces in a ghoulish light, becomes almost hallucinatory at times and helps to add to this film's unsettling subtext of the demons within all of the characters.

Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Kill Zone features a bombastic lossless Cantonese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix which provides ample LFE and some excellent immersion throughout the film's running time. Though Kill Zone is perhaps a bit "talkier" than the typical Hong Kong action fare, when we do get some of the hyperbolic fight sequences, the surrounds erupt with wonderfully immersive activity. The sound of runnning gangsters pans through the soundfield, and the smack of police batons may have some listeners ducking their head in fear. This doesn't seem to have been an overly looped film, as so many Hong Kong efforts are, and so the dialogue has a uniform sound quality and generally even reverb ambience. Foley effects, underscore and dialogue are all extremely well mixed. Fidelity is great and the dynamic range here is often spectacular.

Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Dragon Dynasty release of Kill Zone is a bit lighter on supplements than other releases in this imprint have been:

• Another excellent Feature Commentary by Bey Logan is included.
• Interview Gallery offers some good, in depth interviews with all of the major cast and director Yip, divided into separate chapters:
  Born to be Bad: Sammo Hung (SD; 14:47)
  Echoes of Darkness: Simon Yam (SD; 13:54)
  First Among Equals: Donnie Yen (SD; 39:13) (in English)
  A Dragon Rising: Jordy Wu (SD; 22:27)
  A Man Apart: Wilson Yip (SD; 17:43)
• Promotional Gallery includes 2 trailers and 4 television spots.

Kill Zone Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Kill Zone defies expectations virtually every step of the way and is yet another strong entry from director Yip. No one is entirely good or bad in this film and that gives Kill Zone a nicely ambivalent edge that feels very right for our current world. Though the Blu-ray has some minor image issues, overall this is a strong hi-def presentation and the film itself is Highly Recommended.