Kowloon Walled City, a military fort turned ungovernable residential area in Hong Kong that was demolished in 1993, feels like the product of a screenwriter’s imagination run wild. As depicted in Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, the city’s self-sustaining ecosystem is almost entirely shut off from the real world, its 35,000+ residents living and working entirely within its confines despite rampant poverty and the prevalence of Triad gangs. It may have stood strong in Kowloon for just under a century, but in director Soi Cheang’s Cannes Midnight Premiere, it can’t help but feel like a melting pot of various movie dystopias of recent years, from the allegorical back carriages of the train in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, to the looming Peach Tree apartment buildings home to over a million in Dredd.

This isn’t the Walled City’s first appearance in pop culture, with several martial arts movies from both East and West taking advantage of the location during its waning years before demolition, but it’s the first time that it feels like the setting was invented wholesale as an allegory for the changing face of Hong Kong itself. Set in the late 1980s, the final years before the handover from Britain to China, the straightforward crime saga tells the story of how Chinese immigrant Chan Lok Kwan (Raymond Lam) takes refuge in the city after fleeing from the unimaginatively named crime boss Mr. Big (Sammo Hung), which is run by rival crime lord and full-time barbershop owner Cyclone (Louis Koo). For a little while, safely confined within the city’s walls, Chan Lok Kwan is able to rise the ranks and settle into a new life thanks to the relative freedoms he has there, but developments outside ensure that those freedoms will be short-lived.

As you should probably expect from a film granted a theatrical release in mainland China, where it has already proven a sensation prior to its Cannes debut, the allegory never becomes anything more specific than what’s outlined above – but that is also largely because Cheang understands this is a movie to be felt, not thought. The characterisations are thin across the board, many of the secondary characters made to be distinctive either through hairstyles or simple-but-effective costuming, and despite some preposterous twists as the movie hurtles through its third act, this tale of rival gangs isn’t something you haven’t already seen before. This isn’t a movie that you watch for the narrative intrigue, however, and once you accept that the plot – adapted from the comic book City of Darkness – is fairly run-of-the-mill despite a unique setting, you can better appreciate the entire story as a McGuffin; a feature-length excuse to stage some of the most exhilarating action set pieces of late.

Cheang hits the ground running with a chase scene, complete with a brief double-decker bus fight interlude, that whisks us into the Walled City itself, where all the movie’s pleasures reveal themselves to be purely visceral. Production Designer Kwok-Keung Mak, returning to work with Cheang after 2021’s Berlinale premiere Limbo, has built a tactile environment it’s easy to want to get lost in, a crumbling miniature metropolis as dense with little details in a very decrepit alleyway, shop front, and living room as it is with an ever-rotating band of Hong Kong character actors. Whilst the real Walled City was extensively documented prior to its demolition, the adherence to recreating it here isn’t painstakingly faithful; if anything, it’s even more impressive when considering the vast majority of the soundstage designs were likely reverse-engineered with each specific outburst of fight choreography in mind.

And my, what fight choreography there is, with every crevice of this space – from dilapidated urban streets to various rooftops – explored in moments of battle, sequences so energetically staged that it isn’t immediately apparent that, despite the amount of blades and other less expected weapons at play, the action is nowhere near as bloody as you might expect. It’s violent whilst leaving the most visceral casualties of battle merely implied, presumably to ensure extensive play in cinemas throughout the more censorious mainland. This might sound like it dilutes the impact of the action, but if anything is a further testament to how Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In achieves the impossible, thrilling with each elaborately choreographed fight even if the characters are archetypes too broad to invest in, and their every move designed with a lack of harsh realism. It’s undeniably flawed, but it’s hard not to have a good time with it.

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Written by Alistair Ryder

Image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival