Wu Jing position as potential martial arts superstar started with his turn opposite Donnie Yen in Sha Po Lang, so it makes sense that his follow up star vehicle Fatal Contact would embrace the schizophrenia that Wilson Yip and Yen gave SPL. Like that film, Fatal Contact is a tale of two distant tones, this time one gets plenty of choreography built around Wu Jing fighting prowess but also a morality tale about the dangers of corruption that take it as far as it can. It’s a weird marriage made a bit more acceptable thanks to the option of keeping most of action (with a couple of exceptions) limited to official combats, so Fatal Contact can go along with its moral lesson while getting interrupted by Wu Jing showing his skills only when plot makes easier for Dennis Law’s to move to a different tone.
Not surprising the action sequences are much more stronger than the drama build around it, Fatal Contact is specially good at making short displays of power look impactful so even if Wu Jing’s wins a fight in a quick manner it still feels very satisfying. Wu Jing, Dennis Law and action director Li Chung-Chi are also quite good at showing his progress as fighter throughout the film going for more spectacular movements towards a more pragmatic and effective style. That’s important as Fatal Contact is at heart a film about the limits of pragmatism. And this progress that charts Wu Jing lowering himself toward the underground fights world he is now attached, makes Fatal Contact point in a better more graceful and less labored manner than all the twists and melodrama that Law throws at both characters and audience.
It doesn’t help that most of the morality play aspect goes through co-star Miki Young that does very little with it. Law seems to work overtime to sell how its seedy underworld is corrupting both leads but Wu Jing tends to move between very likable and very intense modes and Young remains at lost far to removed to be as affected by everything as Fatal Contact’s heavy handed message asks for. Surprising, it is Ronald Cheng as mix of sidekick and martial arts master who becomes the film one true character able to embody the heaviness of their world.
One might praise Dennis Law and his producers for going for it in this first Wu Jing real vehicle and let the grimness of their chosen film world and its idea about the dangers of pragmatism to resonate as far as they try to go, but that remains just a sketch, the big dramatic arc are there, but it lacks a better development underworld that could really consume its characters. Everything is too disconnected rendering Fatal Contact message abstract and by consequence making its grimness unearned and so unsatisfying. Fatal Contact only really makes sense when Wu Jing is there fighting sacrificing his natural grace for a more primitive form of violence.
A Chinese Feast 