full contact

Bullet-cam; scantily-clad exotic dancers; lots of big guns; lots of big motorbikes, ultra-violence; homophobic elements; sex-starved nymphomaniacs who lack clothes; a screaming rock 'geetar' soundtrack; Chow Yun-Fat, covered in leather and muscles...Full Contact sweats male machismo. And if you can handle all the gratuitous sex, violence and male superiority (try switching off your brain, it helps tremendously), then Full Contact is one heck of an action movie. Chow Yun-Fat plays Jeff, a sneering, leather-waistcoat-wearing, knife-toting bouncer at a sleazy strip club.Jeff's wife, Mona (played with by Anne Bridgewater), dances there, and provides much of the movie's 'semi-nude female' content.Jeff's friend, Sam (Anthony Wong), is being menaced by a loan-shark he can't repay -- his life is on the line. Jeff saves Sam, but now both of them have a price ont hier head, and must flee together. They flee to Hong Kong, where they agre to help out Sam's cousin, Judge (Simon Yam), with a gun-heist. Everything goes wrong, and Jeff is cast out of his old life; he spends the rest of the film fighting to regain the life he had, and trying to wreak revenge on Judge. None of the characters in the film are particularly three-dimensional, and there is a strong sense of the plot -- which, with its themes of honour and vengeance,  is right out of John Woo's book -- driving the characters, and not vice versa. However, this kind of movie is clearly not supposed to be appreciated for its understanding of the human state, but rather more for its ability to bang louder and explode bigger than most other movies. There are big guns, big knives, big bangs and big brawls -- and Chow Yun-Fat is at the centre of it all, kicking ass in style. As usual, Chow Yun-Fat gives a wonderful performance, but here he does not have so much to perform with; his character is a sterotype action hero, and he only narrowly escapes becoming completely one-dimensional. But still, he's a kind of cool stereotype; he looks and acts like some uber-butch urban God, never too far from a huge gun/bike/sneer/fight/delete as applicable. He is the exact opposite of the sensitive, romantic heroes he usuaully plays.