The first great filmic disappointment of 2025: He doesn’t beat anyone to death with a gavel.
Anyone expecting such loose stupidity will necessarily be disappointed with the tonal commitment of the situation from Edmond Wong, who grafted a hokey-as-hell message onto the “eternal gentleman of justice” in a so-called true story that explores the corruption charge. For Hong, Kong’s poorest citizens. A scene may locate the yen sporting a lawyer’s wig while shouting “my fellow scholar!”A lawyer is contested for the defense, while the next one goes in—he goes in by pushing a squad of triad henchmen with a hockey stick.
Staged by action director Takahito Ôuchi, the satisfyingly concussive fight sequences don’t suffer too much for having to share the same reality as an overly complex legal case (they’re more beholden to the reality of Yen’s age, much as the years haven’t diminished his skill). But the case itself struggles to match the same intensity of the surrounding chaos, and while the courtroom proceedings are shot with plenty of gusto, Wong’s script is far too hurried and ham-fisted to support the level of detail it tries to pack into the trial, resulting in a movie that seems a lot more grounded when Yen is braining someone with an ice bucket than it does when he’s giving an impassioned speech about the Department of Justice.
Despite being a prosecutor (the titular prosecutor), Fok determines that the defendant in his first case has been framed by a crime syndicate, and — over the course of a long and spirited verbal sparring match that allows Yen to unleash his inner “Lincoln Lawyer” — decides to align himself with the poor kid he was ostensibly supposed to put behind bars (Mason Fung as Ma Ka-kit). Needless to say, prioritizing actual justice over a rubber-stamped conviction doesn’t sit well with the rest of the legal community, some of whom have a vested interest in allowing Hong Kong’s actual drug smugglers to operate unimpeded.
At this point, “the prosecutor” is perhaps the most productive appreciated as the meta-history of an action star that refuses to be elderly of his profession; A time when Hong Kong’s film industry may be waiting less yen, is actively locating tactics to ask more about himself. His commitment to body with this film creates a charismatic underground current and, while obstacles and villains brought to Fok, brought in the case of Fok. Diversity of “safe” to “anything” before the past life of the character, and inevitably, invited the past life of the character as a policeman, the film works because the yen brings the same taste in the smiling scenes to the court as he, Let’s say, the fight where another 20 boys take in the middle of a bar on the roof.
Audiences may be dismayed to realize that the combination will never spread out in the courtroom (which, of course, is the position in which legal justice will have to be triumphant in the end), however, the subway combat on the trail of MA’s recovery is more than passable to settle for this plot from the film’s finale: Yen prefers justice to his own situations than to go to the decisions of a broken system. If nothing else, “the prosecutor” is tangible evidence that the case opposite to him “too old for this shit” deserves to be rejected with prejudice.
Well Go USA will release “The Prosecutor” in theaters on Friday, January 10.
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