Saw Donnie Yen's The Prosecutor
I watched this movie over the weekend and was astonished by everything I saw [ambiguous]. A lot of this post is taken from my Letterboxd review of the film. There's a lot of spoilers in here, so if you planned to see it, you should probably just go do that instead of reading this.
Donnie Yen is a massive movie star with a career in both China and the US, but he tends to play only supporting characters in US films, so I've met a lot of people here who have no idea who he is. I then get to tell them that he is one of my favorite martial arts movie stars. He has a fascinating professional history and has been in a variety of extremely funny and bad movies... in addition to the dozens of huge, very mainstream and successful blockbuster films you'll regularly find him appearing in on both sides of the Pacific. I think I've always loved some of his most uneven movies the best, though.
I think the first movie I ever saw him in was Flash Point, which is known for its dazzlingly strange exploding-roast-chicken assassination scene. I also recommend his early breakdancing teen movie Mismatched Couples... it is, like, scream-out-loud funny-bad and stars Yuen Woo-ping, a very famous choreographer, playing one of the most loathsome characters I've ever seen in a movie. Then, on the other end of the scale, Donnie Yen is in stuff like Ip Man and Iron Monkey and John Wick 4. His career is a rollercoaster.
His latest movie, The Prosecutor, is one he directed. It's not the first time he's directed something, but it's the first time I've seen him direct. It is an impossibly, fascinatingly weird movie about a cop who becomes a prosecutor after being frustrated by prosecutors failing to convict his arrested criminals. He then proceeds to discover that the legal half of the criminal justice system is completely fucked.
But the order in which he discovers that various branches of the legal ecosystem are evil/bad are:
- Defense attorneys?? Why are they first?? This movie initially struck me as unbelievably ass-backwards to lead with a takedown of defense attorneys
- The head of the entire Hong Kong DOJ, he sucks too
- Judges are just like, evil and bad and rich
- Prosecutors are kinda sorta bad (but only because the are lazy). That is in there somewhere too.
However, this movie does fundamentally think that the entire criminal justice system could be saved if only one sufficiently moral and righteous prosecutor, who believes in the inherent justice and goodness of the criminal justice system, would show up and be really charismatic and committed to the truth. The movie spends a lot of time on extremely direct takedowns of various corrupt, rich, heartless lawyers... it even addresses the degree to which legal procedure itself prolongs the suffering of the wrongly accused. There's a whole ass montage of wrongfully-convicted people. But it also constantly recommits to the possibility of justice and rightness within the system, sometimes in the same scene or the same breath as its critiques. It's a fascinatingly tortured blockbuster!!
There is a sequence where a judge admits that he convicts tons of people who are probably innocent, and insists that he has to because he has to follow the law. He does this while handing Donnie Yen's protagonist a $1000 glass of wine, which he then nobly refuses to drink. This scene - and other scenes where the protagonist is in extremely direct conflict with powerful and wealthy institutional leaders - ends without any intense argument or any real suffering for his character.
In the end, nobody in the legal system really manages to harm Donnie, and all the major prosecutor characters finally become friends after he inspires them by going rogue and sort of becoming the defense attorney - while still employed as a prosecutor - for a guy HE managed to wrongly convict (under duress) in the first act. This movie is tying itself into so many knots trying to straddle the prosecutor/defense attorney identity for Donnie's character... in some of the courtroom scenes, I could barely track what was even going on.
Oh, and the entire time, the cops are always good. It's only the lawyers who manage to be flawed. This was not surprising to me, haha.
I won't critique this through a lens of censorship because I fully believe that this is exactly the same philosophy that a big budget 90s-2000s American movie with a similar plot would have embraced. This is part of the reason I was so fascinated by this movie - it feels like something I have seen so many times before, but just weirder and worse at defending itself.
I believe this kind of ideologically tortured storytelling comes primarily from big budgets and big investment, not censorship. I think it also comes from the desire of stars like Donnie to be family friendly super-duper clean heroes. I would love to see a depressing and realistic story about a cop who tries to clean up the legal system... then ends up being just as corrupt as a lawyer as he was while working as a cop. But you're just not ever gonna get a movie like that from Donnie, or from a movie with enough investors to employ Donnie.
The combat sequences in The Prosecutor are pretty good. Some of them are extraordinarily unmotivated... but there are some good ones in there! The first combat sequence suggests that Donnie Yen's unique sensibility as a martial arts director may be drone shots and Hardcore Henry style sequences?? It's not amazing-looking, but I did appreciate the enthusiasm with which he used these techniques. I would honestly like to see him lean even further into his deranged personal preferences. He should strap a gopro to every foot and fist in the movie.
There are moments where he achieves almost a kind of twee whimsy with cameras strapped to things like mail packages or evidence carts or whatever. I think he should just do that shit constantly and see what happens. It would come out looking like a twee late-90s French art film, I think.
The movie also strikes me as pretty racist!! The criminal world of The Prosecutor's 2020s Hong Kong is largely foreigners and brown people. It starts getting more and more conspicuous as the movie goes on. Donnie... you grew up partially in fucking Boston, the most racist city in the Northeast. Surely you know this looks bad. What are you doing. Bro. Please.
Glad I saw this ideologically tortured, bizarre thing. Like many of his other flawed movies, it will occupy more space in my brain for longer than his successes. Donnie Yen can do better as a director... I really do want to see what happens when he leans fully into the whimsy of bizarre combat scene styling. Luckily, we are going to probably actually see this very soon - he is directing the John Wick spinoff Caine, where he will again play the blind gangster martial artist from John Wick 4. I am excited for it!!