I have never really been much of a fan of Donnie Yen. Why? Well I don't really know. Recently, though, I have started to overcome this and started to watch his movies.

"Flashpoint" is a great, high speed, Hong Kong police, action thriller. Sure, the storyline here is something that has been seen before in countless other police movies, both Asian and Western. But it still worked out well enough, because "Flashpoint" has a good, solid storyline and a heap of adrenaline-filled action and really well choreographed martial arts.

Being a fan of Asian cinema and Hong Kong movies in particular, I found "Flashpoint" to be a rather great movie, and truth be told, actually one of the better police action/thrillers I have seen in a long, long time. I was immediately caught up in the storyline and was blown away by the action sequences.

The people they had cast for the movie were great, not only Donnie Yen (playing inspector Ma Jun),but also Louis Koo (playing Wilson),who always delivers a great performance. It was nice to see Louis Koo in a movie of this type and see him out of his usual element. And Collin Chou (playing Tony) really did a splendid job.

As mentioned earlier, "Flashpoint" has some really well-choreographed action and martial arts scenes and sequences. But I must say that the final showdown between Ma Jun and Tony was jawdroppingly amazing. That was one of the best and most adrenaline-filled fights I have seen in a movie. That scene alone makes it well worth watching this movie.

If you like action movies with lots of speed and adrenaline, like martial arts and/or like Hong Kong movies, then you most definitely have to sit down and watch "Flashpoint", because it is a hard hitting spectacular action movie. "Flashpoint" is a well-deserving movie on the DVD shelves of any Hong Kong movie lover.

A kick-ass police procedural with superb action sequences to carry it through. That's all you need to know about this Hong Kong thriller, which utilises a somewhat tired plot line about cops going after a brutal criminal gang as a basis for some absolutely stunning martial arts scenes involving man-of-the-moment, Donnie Yen. Watching this, I was immediately reminded of the storyline of NEW POLICE STORY. Both films involve a thuggish gang of criminals who are always one step ahead of the law, sending bombs to the police, hurting and killing the innocent, with a determined lone detective hot on their trail. I felt that the Jackie Chan film had the emotional edge, but the plot here was perfectly watchable after a slightly shaky start.

Of course, such stories are nothing new and hardly anything that happens here is new. Therefore it has to get by on energy alone, and it succeeds with a kind of breathless determinism. There are a handful of action scenes, mostly brutal fights, thrown in along the way to keep viewers watching, but these are nothing compared to the large-scale climax, a shoot-out between the good and the bad followed by an extremely protracted showdown between hero and villain. It feels very much like an 'old school' kung fu flick, this ending, as scenery is destroyed and Yen battles the villainous Collin Chou for supremacy. Both actors went on record to say that this was the toughest fight scene they'd ever taken part in, and it shows; it's eye-wateringly brutal, full of amazing moves and relentless energy.

Yen is on top form as the hard-ass cop, and I liked his character. There's little of the vain posturing that spoiled his performance in DRAGON TIGER GATE. He's ably supported by the likes of Louis Koo as a sympathetic undercover cop, Bingbing Fan as Koo's girlfriend, and Chou as the slick bad guy. I found that the film looked good and I was entertained throughout, so I give this one a thumbs-up.

I've been a fan of Donnie Yen for over twenty years now and had heard that the fight action in Flashpoint was amongst his best work. I hadn't heard wrong: the hard-hitting full-contact mixed martial arts scenes are as awesome as they say.

It's a shame then that the plot for Flashpoint is so unremarkable, a routine Hong Kong police drama—cops vs triads—which introduces lots of indistinguishable characters in such quick succession that, for a while, it's hard to work out precisely who is good and who is bad.

The dull plot trundles along, with the occasional brief spot of action or brutality to spice things up, and it gradually becomes clearer who is who: Archer Sin (Ray Lui),Tony (Collin Chou) and Tiger (Yu Xing) are Korean brothers who run a smuggling operation, Sam is a gangster who has ratted on his bosses, Wilson (Louis Koo) is a plucky young undercover cop working with tough police inspector Jun Ma (Yen),and Julie (Bingbing Fan) is Wilson's really hot girlfriend. So far so mediocre.

The final third of the film, however, is a whole lot better. A non-stop, blood-soaked, showdown between Ma and the bad guys, with incredible gunplay and some of the most painful looking fight choreography I have ever seen, it is everything I had hoped for and more, leaving the viewer with a better impression of the film overall than it probably really deserves. Hence my more than reasonable rating of 7/10.