Mike Leeder brings another action digest round-up of the news-stories from the world of eastern action that you may have overlooked in the last few weeks…
Ringo Lam & Daniel Wu to set the Sky on Fire..!
Ringo Lam may have been away for a few years, but since returning to action with Wild City, the legendary dark god of Hong Kong action cinema (that’s his nickname in Cantonese!), whose credits include such classics with Chow Yun-fatt as City on Fire, Prison On Fire 1 and 2, Wild Search, Full Contact, the nihilistic School on Fire, and a trilogy of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies including Maximum Risk and Replicant, is back in a big way! His latest project began life as Battle of Life but is now known as Sky on Fire, starring Daniel Wu.
“I said yes without even reading the script because John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark are the guys who have initiated this new wave of classic Hong Kong and I always wanted to work with them. The movie is called Sky on Fire, but it could just as well be described as City on Fire 2,” says Wu.
The film also stars Amber Kuo from Jiang Bing Man, Leon Lai from Love & The City, Zhang Jingchu from Seven Swords, Simon Yam from Bullet in the Head and Gordon Lam from Trivisa.
First trailer can be seen below…
Beverly Hills Cop 4: The heat is on again..?
The original Beverly Hills Cop helped cement Eddie Murphy’s super-stardom in the mid 80s – although its hard to believe that it had begun life as a project for Sylvester Stallone (his take on the project took a much darker tone and eventually evolved into Cobra). Murphy – fresh from the success of 48 Hours & Trading Places leaped into the role of Detroit detective Axel Foley who follows the trail of a friend’s murder to Beverly Hills, where he bangs heads with the bad guys, the good guys, and the residents of the famed, affluent area of Los Angeles. The film was a huge success and was followed a few years later by Tony Scott’s Beverly Hills Cop 2 and a less impressive third sequel, one which didn’t showcase director John Landis or Murphy at anything like their best.
For a long time there has been talk of a possiblefourth chapter, there were even plans for a new take on the show for the small screen, which would have followed Axel Foley’s son as the next generation of Beverly Hills Cop. A pilot directed by Men in Black’s Barry Sonnenfield, starring Brandon T Jackson as Aaron Foley was shot, with Murphy reprising the role of Axel Foley for the first time since 1994’s BHC3, but ultimately it never progressed to series. (Impact has seen the pilot and while it’s not bad, it felt somewhat opportunistic and generic.
But now Paramount has confirmed that the heat is on again with Beverly Hills Cop 4 being fast-tracked towards production, with the Belgium directing-duo Adil El Arbi and Billal Fallah behind the camera and Murphy set to return as the title character. We’ll see how it progresses…
Taken to get a Chinese remake…
“I don’t know who you are. … But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you!”
We’re not quite sure if a Liam neeson substitute exclaiming: “Wǒ bù zhīdào nǐ shì shuí. …… Dànshì wǒ bìxū shì yīgè fēicháng tèshū de jìnéng, wǒ yǐjīng huòdéle yīgè hěn zhǎng de zhíyè jìnéng. Jìnéng, shǐ wǒ zhèyàng de rén, nǐ de èmèng!” sounds quite as menacing in Mandarin
The Taken series has spawned a franchise of its own. The original Luc Besson production of Taken was directed by Pierre Morel and starring Neeson as a don’t-mess-with dad) and spawned a sadly decreasingly quality but bizarrely increasingly lucrative trilogy of movies. It’s soon to have a ‘prequel’ TV series… and is now set to have an official Chinese remake, with Sun Honglei (from Johnnie To’s Drug War) playing the retired counter intelligence agent forced back into the game when his daughter is kidnapped.
Operation Mekong: Eddie Peng & Dante Lam…
The latest action thriller from Dante Lam (Unbeatable, The Viral Factor) reunites him with Unbeatable co-lead Eddie Peng (also known for Rise of the Legend) and is based in the true story of the October 2015 Mekong River Massacre, when two Chinese cargo ships were attacked and their crews murdered and their bodies dumped into the river.
Here’s a quick teaser…
The Game Changer: A Shanghai Mob Story…
1930s Shanghai was the scene for some wild times in Chinese history and a number of film and television series – including The Bund which starred a young Chow Yun-fatt, Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, and Stephen Chow’s God of Gamblers 3: Back to Shanghai – have used that time setting for the basis for all kinds of cinematic mayhem. Now we have director Gao XiXi’s The Game Changer which looks to have borrowed more than a few ideas from The Bund.
The film stars Huang Zitao (soon to be seen in Jackie Chan’s The Railroad Tigers), Wang Xueqi (Monk Comes Down the Mountain), Peter Ho (The Monkey King) and South Korean actress Choo Ja-hyeon.
You can get your first look here… http://video.mtime.com/60979/?mid=233535
