Wolf Hiding (NC16)

106 minutes, opens Jan 4
2 stars

The story: In a fictional South-east Asian country, the Hongtai Group of companies commands respect. Its clean corporate image serves as cover for the crime family’s drugs and human trafficking trade. A lone assassin, Chen An (Nick Cheung), begins disrupting their operations. Mai Long Wen (Ethan Juan) is the cop determined to get Chen An, while Ma Wen Kang (Darren Wang) is the Hongtai lieutenant willing to lay down his life to protect his masters.

Chinese director Marc Ma’s debut feature is a revenge story that takes inspiration from the yakuza movies of Japanese film-maker Takeshi Kitano, but weighs down the succession politics with the intense sentimentality of old-school Hong Kong cinema.

The villainy of the gangsters is hammered home relentlessly – schoolgirls are kidnapped, there are slave markets filled with weeping women, and cherubic children are left in tears when thugs move into their neighbourhood.

One might say this is all part of a story that builds up to a cathartic payoff when moral debts are paid off in blood, but there is a flatness to the portrayals of evil that robs them of all emotion.

Perhaps this is due to the absence of a moral point of view in the film – think of Emily Blunt’s Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Kate Macer looking on with shock at the horrors carried out by the Mexican cartel in Sicario (2015), as she brings to light the spirals of violence caused by the “war on drugs” doctrine.

Cheung’s assassin and Juan’s cop are either not present or do not have much of a reaction, so the scenes of sad children and abused women are presented as artless attempts at eliciting tears.

Chen An’s backstory, revealing his motivations for turning Rambo on the crime family, appears in flashback. At this point, it is almost unnecessary to say that his normal guy-to-vigilante origin story is poisonously mawkish.

Because Wolf Hiding is set somewhere in South-east Asia, the movie’s mainly Mandarin dialogue is interrupted by bursts of English, spoken when Hongtai members make deals with foreign gangsters.

The moments of mangled diction would be unintentionally comedic if they were not so painful to sit through. In Hollywood movies, when making the point that the Caucasian character is a genius, he speaks Mandarin to a startled and impressed Chinese person.

As American actor Bradley Cooper’s confident gibberish proved in Limitless (2011), throwaway moments like these ruin an otherwise fine movie for native speakers. Wolf Hiding deserves a Bradley Cooper Linguistics Prize.

Hot take: This tale of a vigilante wreaking havoc on a crime family is buried under thick schmaltz and action scenes that seek to project the coolness of its stars instead of delivering actual action.