If like us, you’re a person of simple pleasures who gets a real kick out of watching dudes clashing fists, throwing punches, and beating each other to a pulp while doing crazy backflips or jumping off rooftops, do yourself a favor and keep this martial arts extravaganza on your radar.
Set in the 1980s and self-consciously styled after the classic actioners of yore where Jackie Chan, Biu Yen, and Sammo Hung learned their trade and helped turn Hong Kong cinema into a global powerhouse, Soi Cheang’s “Walled In” is like a turbo-charged rollercoaster ride that just keeps on going until your stomach jumps out of your throat.
The plot itself — a mainland immigrant gets sucked into the shadowy Hong Kong underworld and caught in the crosshairs of a brutal feud between rival triad bosses — is serviceable but nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. What makes this movie sing is its uniquely fascinating setting: Kowloon Walled City — a densely-populated, self-regulating no man’s-land of makeshift buildings and narrow alleyways infamous for its black-market trade and rampant gang violence that was torn down in 1993.
