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Sixty-one-year-old martial arts legend Donnie Yen may not be a spring chicken anymore (even his Iron Monkey days are behind him), but the “Ip Man” star is still committed to fighting bad guys with the best of them. Exhibit A: “The Prosecutor,” a solid genre hybrid in which Yen directs himself as a hero cop who decides to become Hong Kong’s most righteous lawyer in order to personally seal the cracks in the region’s legal system. So begins the rare movie that could accurately be described as a “bone-crunching courtroom thriller,” as Yen’s character adopts an uncommonly hands-on approach to arguing his first big case.
The first great filmic disappointment of 2025: He doesn’t beat anyone to death with a gavel.
Anyone hoping for such wanton silliness is bound to be disappointed by the tonal compromise of Edmond Wong’s screenplay, which grafts some hokey-as-hell messaging about the “eternal light of justice” onto a supposedly true story that explores the cost of corruption for Hong Kong’s poorest citizens. One scene might find Yen sporting a barrister’s wig as he shouts “my learned colleague!” (in English) at a flustered defense attorney, while the next finds him fending off a squad of Triad goons with a hockey stick.
Staged by action director Takahito Ôuchi, the satisfyingly concussive fight sequences don’t suffer too much for having to share the same reality as an overly complex legal case (they’re more beholden to the reality of Yen’s age, much as the years haven’t diminished his skill). But the case itself struggles to match the same intensity of the surrounding chaos, and while the courtroom proceedings are shot with plenty of gusto, Wong’s script is far too hurried and ham-fisted to support the level of detail it tries to pack into the trial, resulting in a movie that seems a lot more grounded when Yen is braining someone with an ice bucket than it does when he’s giving an impassioned speech about the Department of Justice.
And Yen’s character of Fok Chi-ho certainly has reason to criticize the system. As we see in the film’s ballistic prologue, set eight years before the rest of the story, our man once led a raid — guns blazing — against a criminal gang the cops had dead to rights, only for the bad guys to slip through the courts due to a lack of hard evidence. The police are only able to do so much, and all of the CGI-augmented ass-kicking in the world isn’t enough to stop crime in its tracks (the film eases off from the glaringly digital trickery as it goes along, particularly as its action scales down to a more human level that emphasizes fists over guns). So Fok decides to exchange his riot shield for some law books, and a short montage later he re-emerges as the oldest rookie at the Department of Justice, where he immediately flips the entire court system on its head.
Despite being a prosecutor (the titular prosecutor), Fok determines that the defendant in his first case has been framed by a crime syndicate, and — over the course of a long and spirited verbal sparring match that allows Yen to unleash his inner “Lincoln Lawyer” — decides to align himself with the poor kid he was ostensibly supposed to put behind bars (Mason Fung as Ma Ka-kit). Needless to say, prioritizing actual justice over a rubber-stamped conviction doesn’t sit well with the rest of the legal community, some of whom have a vested interest in allowing Hong Kong’s actual drug smugglers to operate unimpeded.
Most devious of all might be the two attorneys hired to defend young Ma (Julian Cheung and Shirley Chan), a generically evil duo who do everything in their power to eliminate their client — and anyone who might testify on his behalf — before Fok can arrange for a climactic retrial. The bad news: The prosecutor may not survive long enough to present his case. The good news: While Fok and Yen have each found a different way of fulfilling their purpose, neither one of them has forgotten how they used to get things done. And if that means taking on both sides of the legal process (or operating on both sides of the camera), then so be it.
To that point, “The Prosecutor” is perhaps best enjoyed as the meta story of an action star who refuses to be aged out of his metier; at a time when the Hong Kong film industry might be expecting less of Yen, he’s actively finding ways to ask more of himself. His full-bodied commitment to this movie creates a charismatic undercurrent all its own, and while the various obstacles and villains introduced to Fok’s case range from “sure” to “whatever” before limply — and inevitably — doubling back to invoke the character’s previous life as a cop, the movie works because Yen brings the same grinning relish to the courtroom scenes as he does to, say, the brawl where he takes on 20 different guys in the middle of a rooftop bar.
And while Yen makes sure to acknowledge that he isn’t as young as he used to be, such admissions prove needlessly self-effacing. Maybe the digital trickery he leans on during the opening skirmish is just a clever way of lowering the bar for the rest of the movie to come, but Yen is still an elite martial artist with a rare knack for combining balletic grace with brutal force. Sure, his foley effects have never been louder (every punch sounds like a golf club swinging into the trunk of an oak tree), but Yen flings his body around with tremendous purpose, and he knows how to mine real fun out of seemingly banal locations. Even something as bland as the back of a cargo truck can turn into a visual playground within the span of a single kick.
Audiences may be dismayed to realize that the fighting would never spill into the courtroom (which, of course, is where legal justice must prevail in the end), but the subway brawl on the way to Ma’s retrial is more than satisfying enough to accept this film’s closing argument: Yen would rather mete out justice on his own terms than surrender to the rulings of a broken system. If nothing else, “The Prosecutor” is hard evidence that the case against him being “too old for this shit” should be dismissed with prejudice.
Grade: B-
Well Go USA will release “The Prosecutor” in theaters on Friday, January 10.
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