There are movies that wear their ambitions like borrowed suits a size too large, and then there is The Prosecutor, a film that struts into the courtroom with the swagger of Donnie Yen and leaves you wondering if it’s about to deliver an impassioned plea or break into a roundhouse kick. Donnie Yen, Hong Kong’s tireless apologist for action set-pieces, both acts and co-produces here, and makes his usual promise—a punch with a side of principle. Yet what we get is a genre hybrid so muddled it feels like it’s been shaken, not stirred, and then poorly strained by legal censorship.
Yen is front and center as Fok Chi-ho, a cop-turned-prosecutor who pursues justice first with his fists and then with his law books, as if Hong Kong’s legal system were the final boss he must defeat one-on-one. It’s classic Donnie: his face is all battered good intentions, his body whittled to deliver justice at 120 frames per second. And when the fighting erupts—oh, how the movie finally remembers to breathe. These skirmishes, orchestrated with Japanese action director Takahito Ouchi, have that familiar Yen snap: limbs flying, bodies twisting, choreography so tight it verges on a kind of martial ballet. For a few precious minutes at a time, The Prosecutor is pure, kinetic delight—the kind that martial arts fans tuck away like secret pleasures, guilty or otherwise.
But then the movie remembers it’s supposed to be a courtroom thriller, and the air goes out of the room. We’re thrust into legal verbal jousts where nobody seems very interested in the law, least of all the scriptwriters. There’s an admirable effort, I suppose, to blend the Johnnie To–school of Hong Kong justice with a bit of Law & Order gloss, but mostly it plays like a karaoke night where everyone agreed on a different genre. When the English dialogue creeps in, as if imported on a shipping container from some festival circuit fever dream, it just pulls you out. Speak Cantonese, man—there’s no integrity in authenticity when you’re code-switching just to look cosmopolitan.
Yen tries heroically to elevate the limp script, squaring up against Julian Cheung’s slick drug lord and Michael Hui’s sphinxlike chief prosecutor with more conviction than the material deserves. Kent Cheng brings a glimmer of comic relief—Bao Ding, the maverick amidst the suits—but there isn’t a single performance here that threatens to steal the spotlight from Donnie’s flying elbow. Sadly, for all the cast’s efforts, the emotional stakes have the depth of a TVB Tuesday rerun. The dialogue—alternately wooden and melodramatic—has the unintentional effect of making you root for the next brawl, if only to drown it out.
You see flashes—flickers—of what The Prosecutor could’ve been. There are hints at the brittle machinery of Hong Kong’s justice system, references to real-life corruption, allusions to those grand moral dilemmas about law and order. But the movie doesn’t so much explore these as it does fumble them, turning what should be juicy social critique into a hollow outline. If Chow Yun-fat’s The Corruptor married neon sleaze to moral ambiguity, this one brings a plastic plant to the reception and calls it a bouquet.
Visually, there’s nothing to remember. The cinematography might charitably be called clean; the settings, a series of interchangeable holding pens for either punches or piety. Every time the camera lingers on a set of bookshelves or a court bench, you can almost hear the director counting out the beats before the next punch lands. If the law in Hong Kong is theatre, here it’s pantomime—waiting for Donnie Yen to bust the fourth wall.
And—let’s not kid ourselves—if you come to a Donnie Yen film, you want to see him fight. On that count, I was happily sated. Does it match the muddy, existential swirl of The Corruptor? Hardly. Here, the rules are clean, even if the storytelling isn’t. You know Yen will punch through the red tape, and you just hope the paperwork doesn’t land on you. He gives it his absolute all, carrying the movie’s muddled ambitions like Atlas with a briefcase. The result: a film that’s watchable in the sheer, animal joy of its star’s exertions, but there’s no soul in the script to keep your brain at ringside.
In the end, The Prosecutor wants to be both a gavel-banger and a bone-cruncher, but instead splits the difference like a hapless justice system torn between reform and tradition. If you’re a Yen-head, you’ll relish the fight scenes—the only honest part of the whole production. For everyone else, this is a mediocrity with high kicks: a movie that puts justice on trial and loses the case on every count except choreography. The verdict? Enjoy it, but expect nothing more than reasonable doubt.
