The Prosecutor

It’s not often I got an out-of-the-blue film appear across my desk, but such it was with The Prosecutor. Not something I’d normally look into too deeply - nothing personal mind - I grew up with certain Hong Kong films being totemic, mainly John Woo’s Hard Boiled (especially the elusive widescreen, subbed version) and The Killer. Add a few years and we were graced by Johnnie To’s work, which is almost always excellent, and Exiled is a downright minor masterpiece, I remember seeing that at the cinema when I was getting to three films a week, expecting nothing, and walking out recognising the film’s influences, but appreciating its nuanced brilliance.  

But Donnie Yen is not someone whose work I know well, but in what little I’d seen of him he has always had an easy screen presence, not something to be underappreciated and so on a bloody, stuffy hot June evening it seemed that dropping into The Prosecutor was the right thing to do, a film not only starring Yen but directed by him too. 

After a violent raid where the criminals go unpunished, Detective Fok (Yen) leaves the police force to learn the law. Seven-years later and he is Prosecutor Fok, working to ensure criminals are found guilty. But what if an innocent is caught in the web of criminals? Manipulated and found guilty when clearly a patsy? Fok, embracing his sense of justice, fights for it. Often very literally.  

There’s a line in Ridley Scott’s Alien that is almost always used when writing about that film: “I admire it’s purity”. It’s used for a reason, because it equates to the alien and to the film and is something the film has in spades. However it is something The Prosecutor lacks. To return to my original statement, this is not my usual watch and yet at nearly two-hours, it’s a pretty fluid film, imperfect certainly but it’s worth introducing this because many a 90-minute film is purgatory, so for all the film’s faults (and its virtues) it's never dull, even if it has screenplay that recycles tropes to the point where you wish it would try and generate a personality and decide what it really wants to be. I was thinking of the last Johnnie To film I’d watched – I forget which it was – and The Prosecutor needs some of To’s sardonic cynicism and natural sense of playful justice. As here the screenplay could not be more by the numbers if thrown through Chatgpt. Yet it still works.  

This is, I think, for two reasons; one is the old chestnut of righting a wrong, when faced with a miscarriage of justice we can root for someone willing to go to bat for the victim. The other is Donnie Yen’s ability to hold the screen. 

Returning to that purity, the film struggles to know what it wants to be. It opens with a sequence which is immediate action: a police raid that is directed like this is a First Person Shooter. We are Donne Yen as he switches weapons, takes bullets on his shield and drags colleagues away. It’s intense and very much trying to put us into Yen’s position even though the end result definitely feels like a computer game, even down to the sudden gun-switches. This is not a bad thing, it’s a chosen aesthetic. After this the film then moves between Yen as prosecutor (with a police officer’s desire for judgement) and action movie, and this is where for me it felt like the film needed to choose more of a side.

It is noticeable that when we first move into the courtroom that the music builds in the way it might before an action sequence, so that it is trying to parallel action in the court with action we may see outside it. The action in the court though never lives up to the audible buildup or matches the outside action with which it is interspersed. We see Yen battling as a prosecutor, and convincing those around him to do likewise, but these scenes - if well performed for the most part - lack any real bite except in moments. It cannot quite work out how to translate the concepts of action to the mental acuity required in the courtroom. It’s more confident when Yen is not being just an arse-kicking legal ace but a kicker of arses. But Yen before a judge is never quite as thrilling, the film lacking the tension and with required to bring the legal arguments to life. It doesn’t help perhaps that at times Yen’s direction takes the easy way out: the young man, clearly innocent and manipulated by some unscrupulous pro-bono defenders, tends to have to look up at the sky, waiting for justice to arrive. It’s lacking imagination but much of that seems to stem from the script.  

It’s a shame because for all that elements of the story are obvious, there could have been a desire to move Yen into a different role, one of the martial arts of the mind alone, because much of the criminal law aspects are rote as can be, even if oddly we don’t mind too much. Again, mainly because we respect what Yen as Fok is doing. Also there are aspects that are ambiguous around the use and possible misuse of power but these are touched on lightly, whereas they could have been brought more front and centre. Nevertheless, these suggestions of possible corruption or a laziness bordering on corruption are a nice touch, even if again handled a bit too simplistically. 

When we segue back into the action where Yen is arguably more at home, though at times it does feel like he’s stepped back into his John Wick moment, even down to the obligatory “having a fight in a bass-thumping club” cos why not? True, in the opening sequence I am (as I tend to be) against his martial arts exploits being slo-mo (honestly this makes it seem less impactful – witness Ong-Bak for being one of the worst perpetrators of that), though later he never does, going more for exhausting, crunching violence. True, there are some moments where the human body goes beyond what it could possibly hope to endure, but these instances are few and far between (such as the car accident which somehow everyone walks away from with scratches rather than long term concussion). But mainly it’s properly bone-crunching stuff and where the film is at its most fluid and assured. 

Yet as I said for a near two-hour film, for all that much of the storytelling is so by the numbers, it’s entertaining and never drags. Yes, it never is a film that quite knows what it wants to be, but it is also what is claims to be by its introductory sequence: a martial arts movie. It’s not quite my usual thing, but Yen has presence enough to put his martial arts aside and perform, but if needing to spend two-hours to be entertained, this is a film that does what it needs to do and I suspect won't disappoint seasoned martial arts fans, though it’s not likely to win over a new audience.

If Yen is able to take his screen presence into new arenas, maybe he can properly branch out in the future? Until then, consider this a work in progress for Yen’s transition.