Like it or not, we, the American people, have set a precedent for what makes a successful action movie – among them a ruthless but righteous protagonist, a villain with a taste for the theatrical, and of course chubby comic relief that gets plugged early on in the picture. Clash (Bay Rong) adheres to those principles as dogmatically as possible, and you know what? Despite a cautionary budget for making a full-fledged action picture, it works, at its best no worse than a low-rent Statham flick. The choreography is serviceable and occasionally impressive, and there’s plenty of plot to go around – only the third acts sags, and coming up on the heels of an exciting hour and twenty minutes, that’s a bargain.
The beautiful (and therefore deadly) Phoenix (Ngo Thanh Van), trained to kill by her boss and retainer Hac Long (Hoang Phuc Nguyen), completes mission after mission in hopes of retrieving her daughter from Long’s clutches. For this particular one, she assembles a group of men including Tiger (Johnny Tri Nguyen). The mission goes belly-up, with one of the team making off with the loot, a laptop, and now Phoenix and Tiger must go on the hunt while evading the police and exploring their feelings for each other. With the first half of the film devoted to a fisticuffs-heavy heist and the rest to the eventual showdown between all surviving parties, Clash moves quickly and with plenty of tried-and-true style – everyone dons sunglasses and the fight scenes are showy rather than brutal.
DVD Bonus Features
Excellent, excellent special features on this DVD, including ten minutes with our two leads, five minutes with the rest of the cast, a very informative “Anatomy of a Fight”, led by the director (five minutes as well), a music video and the original trailer. My only gripe with the DVD is that there are several trailers you can forward through but can’t skip entirely at the beginning. Otherwise, really insightful stuff for a foreign production – the fight choreography segment in particular, while no different from what you’d get on a more extensive Hollywood blockbuster inside look, is worth a watch just to see the amount of labor that went into the production and how the director approached the sequence, which are a major selling point for the film.
"Clash (Bay Rong)" is on sale August 9, 2011 and is rated R. Action, Crime, Foreign, Martial-Arts. Directed by Le Thanh Son. Written by Johnny Nguyen. Starring Johnny Tri Nguyen, Ngo Thanh Van, Hoang Phuc Nguyen.
