Move of the month sha po lang 2

When undercover Hong Kong cop Chan Chi-kit (Wu Jing) has his cover blown during a shootout with the police he finds himself swiftly handed over to a corrupt prison in Thailand and falsely imprisoned. As he is being admitted to the prison the Chinese kung-fu movie star manages to unleash a couple of moves that immediately knock out one of the prison guards. Unfortunately the other prison guard just happens to be Thai martial arts expert and movie star Tony Jaa (mortal kombat annihilation) and the resulting fight scene sets the pace for the rest of this movie.

As far as baddies go this movie has Mr. Huang, a gang leader involved in the business of killing people before harvesting and trafficking their organs. Coincidently our bad guy also just happens to be in need of a new organ himself. You would think getting his hands on the new heart he requires would be as easy as Tim Cook getting his hands on an iwatch, but things obviously aren’t that simple. It turns out he has a rare blood type and the only match is his own brother, who the gang try to capture in the airport shootout that results in the undercover Wu Jing getting sent to a Thai prison and the bad guy’s brother lying in the hospital under police protection.

Here the plot gets tricky because the supervising officer in the shootout is also uncle to the undercover Wu Jing. When our bad guy shows a torture video the supervising officer decides to kidnap the hospitalised brother as the only possible bargaining chip for his nephew’s life. Now we have a three way situation with the renegade policed officers, the rest of the police force, and the bad guys all trying to get their hands on the brother.

Just to add another twist to the plot prison guard Tony Jaa has a daughter who is dying from leukaemia, and the only bone marrow match doctors have managed to identify is another character central this the movie’s plot. (I’m not going to release that spoiler but you might be able to guess who it is.)

You should at least have guessed that Tony Jaa and Wu Jing ultimately team up to kick some ass. There is also a gang of Koreans who do the actual corpse butchering, and the man running the prison just happens to be another famous martial artist (Zhang Jin, crouching tiger hidden dragon) and this movie’s most powerful character.

Here I’ve given enough of the plot away so that those with an upper intermediate level of Mandarin should be able to follow the movie without English subtitles. Unfortunately some of the dialogue is in Thai with Chinese subtitles, but don’t let that put you off. If you want to watch an action packed collaboration between Hong Kong directors and Chinese actors this summer you should watch 杀破狼 Sha po lang 2 Time For Consequences, now showing in Cinemas in Mainland China.