Product Description

(Action) A naïve young athlete joins an underground prizefighting circuit to earn a little extra money to support his girlfriend. Surrounded by greed and ruthlessness, he is hardened into a brutal fighting machine, defeating opponent after opponent in a series of vicious battles, until he reaches the ultimate showdown where both his life and his soul hang in the balance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #44067 in DVD
• Brand: WELLSPRING/GENIUS
• Released on: 2008-01-22
• Rating: Unrated
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Cantonese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 106 minutes

Customer Reviews

Wu Jing kicks his way into a starring role... finally!
I won't dive too deep into this. For one, it's pretty shallow. For two, you need to see it for yourself. The fast and graceful Wu Jing plays Kong, a martial artist who performs for the (contemporary) opera. His athletic prowess is observed by some gangsters, who offer him some lucrative pay to fight in underground matches for them. He declines, of course, then is persuaded by the girl he likes. She is attracted to money, and she likes watching other guys get their tails kicked. She's also really hot, so he decides to go for it. After he wins a couple of matches, his girl negotiates better pay and higher stakes. A rival gangster (a pimped out Ken Lo), whose fighters have all lost to Kong, is determined to beat him. So the matches get more and more dangerous.

Like "The Protector", this movie is short on plot and heavy on fights. The plot in this is WAY more coherent, but the fights aren't nearly as plentiful. This is more of a heart-breaker because with some tightening up, it could've been a good movie all around. With fights like these though, I'll take what I can get. These are some of, if not THE best fights that I've ever seen. This is the type of choreography (by Nicky Li, a former member of Jackie Chan's stunt team) and editing that should be done in ALL fight movies. The brawls are FAST, creative, tough, and athletic.

Dragon Dynasty gives us a great version with plenty of special features. I haven't watched any of them yet. I didn't think that the extras were necessary to recommend the film. The English dub is bad, so I would recommend the subtitles. I don't know who this is on the cover though. It really doesn't look like Wu Jing at all. -1 star for plot. 5 stars for fights. 5-1=4

2006

[3.5] There's a new sheriff in town
Wu Jing made his presence quite known in the wonderful Kill Zone movie, which was originally recognized for Donnie Yen vs Sammo Hung, but some people like myself may have found the Donnie Yen vs Wu Jing fight the real highlight of the film. Wu Jing was very memorable. I was very pleased to learn that another HK martial arts movie would be continuing to showcase his talents, this time, by putting him as the lead role in "Fatal Contact". While in Kill Zone he played a villain, he's a good guy here - in fact, a very good guy, too good. As the story describes on the reverse dvd cover "he is a young naive man". That actually got to be nearly annoying early on, but in the end, that sets things up for a better story.

Not that I purchased this for story, but I was rather amazed. Like Kill Zone, there is emotion to this film and depth between characters. You wouldn't expect this from things early on in the film. This movie gets a slow start, and even slow with the action. But that is the beauty of it in the end. The film slowly gets darker and deeper, and the action...yeah, as expected is teriffic.

In the end it is all about the action. Wu Jing is definetly in top shape here. He's extremely athletic, fast and powerful. His moves and style are very refreshing to the martial arts genre. The directing and choreographer certainly worked well with this guy, and it shows in every breathtaking scene. The action in the film is nearly all one on one fights, and while they begin kinda slow and short, each fight gets longer and more brutal. I was expecting the climax of the film to be a huge fight, but instead it focuses on a very important element to the story. It's still not dissapointing, but it's not a fight scene so much.

Like many will point out, Chan an Li are going to be gone soon, and surely missed. We certainly don't want the genre to leave them. They can never be replaced, but when you got guys like Tony Jaa and now Wu Jing, things ar looking good for the future of ths genre. Fatal Contact could have been better overall, as the story is not great, but still above average for this genre. It comes down to martial arts action, and even more so, watching Wu Jing in action.

Action - 4.5
Characters - 3.5
Dubbing - 2.5
Story - 3.5
Overall - 3.5

Disappointing but still has great action
I was a bit let down by this one, but should I really have expected a lot to begin with? I didn't go in knowing much, other than being quite impressed by the lead actor in SPL. For the record, I rented this one and didn't see any of the extras. Just the film.

Emotionally and thematically this movie was all over the place. Taken as a whole, it was a mess. There were a lot of individual scenes and some characters that worked really well, but it's like someone was trying to make 4 movies at once. I really liked the three leads for the first 90 minutes. They became good friends and had some very funny scenes, especially the big training scene. The action as well was all excellent. But the last 15 minutes or so were terrible. And what about that lead, Jacky Wu? He was great, but his character had no reason to do all that fighting. Ok, he technically did it for the money, but on a whim. He wasn't greedy. He was poor before but had no trouble getting by. He didn't even want to fight at first because it was illegal and he was an all-around nice guy. Just didn't make sense. Oh and this is not a tournament movie. Wu's character just gets used by two rich guys who keep gambling with each other over their own fighters.