Critics reviews

Given two staggeringly gifted martial-arts stars—Hong Kong's Wu Jing and Thailand's Tony Jaa—and an insane script about bodies being moved, damaged, and commodified that has zilch to do with the 2005 Donnie Yen vehicle SPL (a.k.a. Kill Zone), Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.

The tortuous interconnectedness and convenient coincidences rack up in director (and frequent Johnnie To collaborator) Cheang Pou-soi's sleekly choreographed thriller, which is dizzily entertaining when the knives, bullets, and feet are flying, and sometimes painfully melodramatic during the interim exposition.

This is an anxious film wracked with paranoia, and director Soi Cheang (of the Milkyway productions Accident and Motorway) sustains a tone of barely contained hysteria. People are profitable bloodbags for Louis Koo, and the movie continually emphasizes the brute limitations of the human body.

What's really impressive about SPL 2 is its genuine interest in tracing and retracing the convoluted battles that are happening inside its characters' bodies. Hereditary illness, organ harvesting, drug addiction, even the complications of whether or not you can speak the language of your potential blood donor, all result in a decidedly inward terrain, where people can pummel the hell out of one another but the real consequences are deep and untouchable.

Everyone, hero and villain, gets kicked to absolute shit in this movie, if not additionally stabbed and/or shot. If you thought American action heroes absorb an irrational level of violence you've never seen a film by Cheang Soi, whose men are pushed to the edge and beyond, testing both body and the will to stay alive. Suffice to say, A Time for Consequences is a clobbering return to form for the maestro of brute survival.