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Developed by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate and directed by butt-kicking luminary Donnie Yen, The Prosecutor is a bizarre mashup of courtroom procedural and action flick; it is just as keen on lionising due process and the “shining light” of Chinese justice as it is on reducing civic infrastructure to smithereens in several standout bouts. But Yen, who looks undeniably good in a suit, is more convincing on his habitual fisticuff grounds than the jurisprudential ones.
Yen plays Fok, a one-time hotshot cop who – leaving the force after some over-zealous policing – decides to man the “final gate” of justice and become a public prosecutor. Like a low-carb Perry Mason with years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu behind him, trouble keeps knocking on his door. Suspecting that a young drug smuggler (Mason Yung) whose case he is assigned has pled guilty to get his higher-ups off the hook, Fok starts looking into his slippery lawyer, Au Pak Man (Julian Cheung).
Insisting his character’s knees are shot and he can’t do this for ever, The Prosecutor lays the ground for a post-martial arts career for Yen. Not that you’d know it from undimmed reserves of inventiveness here: a hyper-dynamic initial police raid, with Yen toting a submachine gun and riot shield, flits between drone-borne third-person and first-person cop’s eye mayhem. But this brio is dragged down by the convoluted and muddily dramatised legal sequences. Trying to establish Fok’s counter-intuitive prosecuting style, it is confusing in the detail and manipulative in the summary arguments there to set up Au’s cartoon villainy.
Maybe a more grounded director, such as Johnnie To, could have made an eyebrow-raising conceit like a vigilante prosecutor work. Though Yen raises fleetingly interesting points about the pliability of the justice system, he can’t bend enough to reconcile the film’s legal and brawling sides in a way that avoids glaring irregularities; surely, for example, Fok’s extracurricular tangling with the drug gang would have seen him immediately struck off? Yen’s self-confidence as a performer may make the courtroom grandstanding appear self-righteous, but that is no bad quality out on the warpath. He even sells saying “I object!” mid-melee in the finale as he and a knuckle-dusting thug pound a metro carriage like a steel drum.
