Clash

After a digression towards the serious in Adrift, the elegant drama of Bui Thac Chuyen and winner of the Fipresci Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 which also had some success in the Vietnamese market despite being an auteur film, Johnny Tri Nguyen returns to play the role of the emotionless hero in an action film which, as was the case in the celebrated The Rebel (2006), was made for him. In fact, Nguyen also produced and wrote Clash, a defiant variation of the classic plot in which an undercover policeman infiltrates the criminal world to thwart the evil villain.
Long, known to everyone as Black Dragon, is, as a matter of fact, the textbook diabolic figure. A human trafficker, he literally plays with the lives of the men and women that he marks with a tattoo on the nape of the neck, as though they were pawns in a cruel, bloody game of chess. Clash opens with the end of one of these sadistic games which sees a daughter fight to her death against her own mother. The next victim lined up for the perverse intentions of Black Dragon is the young Trinh, who is known as Phoenix (Ngo Tranh Van). In order to win back the daughter that Black Dragon has taken from her, Phoenix has to complete the mission of recruiting a group of ex-convicts, known only by their code names: gutsy Tiger, treacherous Snake, Falcon the driver and Ox the dwarf. Together, the team has to steal a laptop, containing a programme which allows access to secret government data, from a gang of shady Frenchmen. The proverbial briefcase that contains it is at the centre of a cutthroat hunt in which the local triads are involved. And, of course, not everything goes smoothly, and the mission ends up a bloodbath that leads to the explosive break-up of the group. Tiger and Phoenix find themselves alone and betrayed; it’s time to let the masks fall and reveal their respective identities and motivations… but Quan (Tiger) keeps one final secret to himself, at the risk of losing Trinh’s trust.
Johnny Tri Nguyen’s gifts as a stuntman are already well-known, and they find in Clash a suitable outlet, thanks to a plot which successfully balances between pure action scenes and discursive passages which move the narrative forward. The real revelation in this film, however, is his leading lady Ngo Thanh Van (who also serves as co-producer). Already seen in The Rebel, Ngo carves out in Clash a conspicuous space to impose a rather versatile screen presence, ranging from the rigidity of the icy captain of the platoon to the painful emotiveness of the blackmailed mother. Still, it is in the actions scenes where her charisma shines through: agile and coordinated, she punches, kick and knees like the most consummate action girl of kung fu films; she beats up and renders powerless in a blink of an eye brutes that are twice her size, without taking a hit. In short, Clash presents Ngo Thanh Van as a shining example of the achievement that has enriched the panorama of Vietnamese action movies, which, until now, has been dominated by men who, despite being impeccable gymnasts, are rather rigid in terms of their acting.
The direction of first-timer Le Thanh Son serves the syntax of the story efficiently, with the pace speeding up and slowing down to reflect the polarity between action and calm. The fights and gunplay scenes are definitely the most convincing, thanks to the tight editing and the choreography is worthy of the more prominent Chinese productions. The omnipresent soundtrack also stands out, bringing to each sequence a different genre and tonality, varying from local rap to techno, from tango to lyric music. And it is not without irony that the song accompanying the sex scene repeats insistently “Open up your door”…