Donnie Yen’s The Prosecutor Pummels and Pleads with Uneven Power
It’s not difficult to see the outline of logic behind director-star Donnie Yen’s interest in fusing two entirely disparate genres–the legal/courtroom drama and the bone-crunching martial arts action film–in his newly arrived star vehicle The Prosecutor, which is hitting U.S. theaters following a December release in Hong Kong. Yen seems to be interested in justice and government systems; the way law enforcement can be hamstrung by other levels of the legal system and bureaucracy; the cascading safeguards needed to avoid loopholes being exploited by corrupt gatekeepers. His character, Fok Chi-ho, is a former supercop who leaves the force to become a prosecutor, intent on bagging bad guys who slip through the net of the justice system, and The Prosecutor wants to explore this same relationship between street level run-and-gun law enforcement and the more slowly grinding wheels of justice in the courts system. The desire to depict the two in the same film makes sense in theory, but in practice the results take on a distinct bipolar absurdity. The Prosecutor is often at odds with itself, but is saved by the sheer, bravura intensity of its superior action thriller side.
A Donnie Yen star vehicle with great action? Big surprise: The man is one of the most accomplished martial arts stars of the last three decades, and at 61 he shows almost no signs of slowing down. He’s an absurdly talented physical performer who is astonishingly well preserved, especially in comparison to several senior citizen western “action stars” whose genuine, physical contribution to their roles has become close to nil in recent years. There’s no doubt that Yen can still go–whether he should is another question, but to just look at the guy on screen you’d think his character was supposed to be 40 rather than 60. He’s a one-and-only, tackling both directorial and star duties here after likewise directing 2023’s wuxia epic Sakra.
Those chops are on display from The Prosecutor’s explosive opening moments, although this sequence, which borrows liberally from first person shooter videogame aesthetics, also involves clever use of CGI to remove some of the burden from Yen’s physical task list. A police raid on a gang hideout results in a firefight of utterly chaotic intensity, much of it seen from Fok Chi-ho’s firsthand perspective from behind a (incredibly durable and seemingly magical) riot shield. Slick editing and the combination of digital and practical effects results in seamless, crunching kicks and stunt men pounded through various wooden surfaces with seemingly reckless abandon. It’s a good illustration of the effective marriage of VFX and practical action choreography, in a way that delivers over-the-top genre delight without falling into the uncanny, stifling artificiality of something like the garishly ugly car crash sequence of Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent Netflix thriller Carry-On, a moment that clumsily takes the viewer out of the film. Yen’s action staging, and the thunderous foley supporting it, leaves you craving the thud of the next kick to the head.
Where The Prosecutor threatens to run aground is in the legalese-steeped other half of its existence, which frequently overstays its welcome. Here the film attempts clumsy socioeconomic commentary on the ivory towered viewpoints of those in the higher tiers of the justice system, without any real teeth, mostly coming off as apologetic for corruption in the system. Fok Chi-ho and his fellow prosecutors are drawn into a scandal involving a pair of comically corrupt defense attorneys who are in bed with drug-smuggling mobsters and potentially corrupt prosecutors, allowing their clients to take the fall in drug trafficking cases to protect the bosses of the scheme. Thus, Fok Chi-ho, sworn to prosecute criminals, ends up being forced by his honor and oath to the law to instead advocate on the behalf of the unlucky souls who were set up to do unearned prison time. More than half of Yen’s screen time is spent in this manner, digging through files and having rapid-fire legal discourse with colleagues in dialog that the English subtitles are barely fast enough to depict.
That might have made for an interesting departure in Yen’s acting career, but the tonal clash of those scenes in the Justice Department and the high-intensity action fare ends up becoming unintentionally comical as they segue into each other with neck-snappingly abrupt transitions. It feels a bit like a Godfrey Ho-style mishmash, like someone clipped together unused footage of two different Donnie Yen vehicles–one where he’s a lawyer wearing an absurd powdered wig, and one where he’s a superhuman cop beating literally dozens of goons at a time to within an inch of death. The two halves of The Prosecutor are like jigsaw pieces that clearly don’t fit together, and smashing them with your fist isn’t a solution. It’s not that we can’t accept Donnie Yen as a kind-hearted lawyer, as his performance has warmth and charm to spare. It’s that his lawyer self seems like an entirely different guy than the one who at one point smashes a mob enforcer’s feet into a pile of jagged, broken glass and then makes a quip about it.
Luckily for audiences, there’s also all that glorious action, and in this respect Yen delivers on a level that quite frankly makes up for any other perceived shortcomings. Each action set piece is distinctive and thrilling, whether it’s Fok Chi-ho and his former police partner taking on a gang of traffickers in a street fight with hockey sticks and projectile coconuts filled with cocaine, or a claustrophobic sequence in a parking garage that features some genuinely dangerous-looking car stunts and falls. It culminates in a bone-breaking subway car fight scene that makes full and creative use of the geography of the setting, wrapping limbs around the steel poles and handholds of the car to turn the fight into a deadly variation on the traditional sliding puzzle. Aside from the John Wick-style gunplay, it’s the kind of fight sequence you would have expected to find in a classic Jackie Chan actioner 30 years ago, and there aren’t many compliments in the genre you can pay that are higher than that.
The Prosecutor is a bit of a strange exercise, although one where you can clearly grasp the gist of what was envisioned. The duality of depicting the struggles of two tiers of law enforcement sometimes threatens to bring the film to a grinding halt, and you could easily trim some of its courtroom antics out and be left with a more streamlined actioner, but the giddy delight of its spectacular choreography and physical performances still carries it to the finish line in style. Some day, Donnie Yen will surely be too old to convincingly kick ass, but for now his presence alone still yields irresistible results.
Director: Donnie Yen
Writer: Edmond Wong
Stars: Donnie Yen, Julian Cheung, Michael Hui, Francis Ng, MC Cheung Tin-fu
Release date: Jan. 10, 2025
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.