RAGING FIRE is Donnie Yen at his bone-crushing best – Fantasia 2021 review

Donnie Yen is back at his bone-crushing best in Raging Fire, a thrilling new cop drama that harkens back to the glory days of ’90s Hong Kong action cinema.

Yen plays Shan, a highly respected and righteous police officer with a long history of storied arrests. In the middle of a complex sting operation, Shan’s team is assaulted by a mysterious team of assassins fronted by Ngo (Nicholas Tse), an ex-cop and Shan’s former protégé. Vowing revenge for his murdered fellow cops, Shan kicks off a frenzied quest to track down Ngo, which forces him to confront some hidden truths about his own complacency in Ngo’s fall from grace.

Filled with incredible action sequences and with a hard-hitting emotional core, Raging Fire is a crowd-pleasing action drama that never insults the intelligence of its audience. Donnie Yen isn’t at his Ip Man level of martial arts mastery here, but imbues Shan with enough brute strength and clever fighting techniques that feel appropriate for a middle-aged cop.

That’s not to say the action set pieces here aren’t hard-hitting. To paraphrase Saturday Night Live‘s Stefon, Raging Fire has it all; a sweeping narrative about the abuse of police power, death-defying stunts, thrilling car chases, a massive shootout in the streets of Hong Kong, and a brutal man to man fight in an abandoned church.

Donnie Yen adds a hard-earned layer of gravitas to Shan, a cop who struggles with his own belief in right and wrong amidst the perceived brotherhood of the police force. Similarly, Nicholas Tse’s Ngo is a complex villain with understandable gripes, which makes his embrace of violence all the more tragic.

Sadly, this is the final release from filmmaker Benny Chan (New Police Story) who wrote, directed, and produced the film (Chan passed away just after filming in August of 2020). With a stirring central plot, stunts that seem to defy the laws of physics, and blockbuster action sequences, Raging Fire is a fitting tribute to Chan’s work, and will likely be the best action film we’ll see this year.

At nearly 60-years-old, Raging Fire reaffirms Donnie Yen as an absolute force of nature to be reckoned with and provides the perfect balance of outrageous action and dramatic character beats. You’ll need a cooling-down period from the adrenaline high when the lights come up.

Raging Fire screened as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival and is in theaters now.