Reviewed by Tim Wong

PRIMED OUT in strokes of retro neon, urban high-rise and strategically-placed red objects, the Hong Kong in Throw Down might as well belong to a post-war 60's Ozu film. In fact, rather than preoccupy itself with endemic Trans-Asian tensions – a washing cycle of many of grudge where either the Chinese disliked the Japanese, the Japanese loathed the Koreans, or all three just didn't get along – the film instead embraces the legacy of its neighbour in two forms: through the art of Akira Kurosawa, and the discipline of Judo.


The latter becomes the subject of Throw Down – an action-drama, by very loose definition – which has had to fight its way through a queue crowded by the likes of Zatoichi, Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Ong Bak. But fight it has, muscling itself into line as the most offbeat, unusual martial arts movie of the year.

Throw Down is directed by Johnnie To, and although I don't so much as subscribe to the auteur theory, he's really the last of his kind – prolific, idiosyncratic and genre-savvy, continuing to prop up Hong Kong Cinema's international clout with an eclectic, yet inherently distinct body of work. Best known as a deft exponent of the crime narrative, his more recent works include sly, often subversive interpretations of the genre, from The Mission (1999) and Fulltime Killer (2001), to PTU (2003) and Cannes in-competition selection, Breaking News (2004). That reputation was confirmed two-fold in September, with Throw Down gaining an official invite to Venice – To's second film of the year, no less.

Like most, I pinned my hopes on this film's progressive approach to martial arts cinema – a narrow playing field conducive mostly to Kung Fu, fantasy swordplay and Bushido-themed melees, and only recently endowed with any sense of change through Ong Bak's emphatic foray into Muai Thai kickboxing. Of course, apart from the addition of flying elbows, knee joints and head butts, Ong Bak remains relatively in the same choreographic ballpark. Judo, alternatively, forbids punches and kicks; disallows weapons of any sort; is kinda like wrestling, just without the spandex. It's different, alright – rough, ungraceful, at times resembling little more than a drunken bar fight – and not surprisingly, can claim only one other film to its name: Sanshiro Sugata (1943)¹, Akira Kurosawa's first ever film as a director, and an obvious reference point for To 60 years on.

And yet somehow, despite any limitations, it works. It's possible, on a base level, the average able-bodied person can relate to the act of grabbing and throwing someone, or being held down in a head-lock, full-nelson or by sheer weight of mass. I can relate to tussling in such methods as a child with friends and siblings, yet I can't – like most, I would assume – identify with impaling or roundhouse kicking or even hitting another person. Appropriately, Throw Down isn't really a violent film, and there's a similar, worldly respect for the philosophy of Judo (which as a non-lethal derivative of Jujutsu, means "Way of Life"), as there is for the humanity of Kurosawa's most life-affirming works.

In keeping with the ethics at hand, To has actually – willingly or not – traversed a parallel route to Bruce Lee's mantra of non-embellished martial arts. There are no wires, no CG effects and no fake blows. Nor does he subject the film and its adopted discipline (apart from one off-screen exception) to the spectacle of death, given that Judo isn't known for its killing prowess. And unlike other subgenres within Throw Down's vicinity – Shaolin Kung Fu, for instance – that uphold a certain moral code, through which is never to be appropriated for use in vengeance or cold blood (but almost always is), the discipline of Judo in Johnnie To's world carries none of that flawed, conflicting baggage. And here's the interesting bit: to the characters in Throw Down, it's an industry-standard; an honorable system of challenge to settle differences between opposing parties; a test of skill between two masters; or as Chinese culture would have it, a means of saving face. It's rock-paper-scissors with added oomph: no one dies, no one argues who won or lost and everyone, it seems, knows it in one way or another.

Spared the hyperbole so typical of the genre, even Throw Down's bare minimum of softcore (yet palpable) fight scenes, don't reduce it to any less of a martial arts fixture. Compared to the narrative stir-fry of recent, supposedly more innate martial arts movies, To is quite content to format his characters in the classic template: Sze-To (Louis Koo), former Judo hotshot turned dilapidated self-wreck; Tony (Aaron Kwok), young enthusiast adamant he'll challenge and learn from the best; Mona (Cherrie Ying), the girl, and semi-love interest; and Kong (Tony Leung Ka-fai), well-weathered Judo grandmaster and obligatory adversary. In between these archetypes are standard conventions – the clash of rival Dojos, pride vs. honour, the redemption of a final showdown – yet elsewhere, the film reaches a sort of sincerity-amongst-chivalry usually reserved for, well, Kurosawa movies.

In this sense, the onus is with Sze-To. Unlike most heroic figures, his fight is internal, and couldn't care less about getting even. Revenge is a dish best not served at all, and as a downtrodden, financially-troubled drunkard, the real struggle at hand isn't settling the score, but standing on his own two feet. He's also ill-stricken with an impending blindness, a tribute perhaps to the cancer-suffering Kanji in Ikiru, or the human frailty of Kurosawa's greatest works. The arc here is predictable – an overcoming threaded into the life-asserting principles of Judo – that culminates in versus mode amidst the wind-swept brush of Hong Kong's outer nature. But like Sze-To, it's at this junction we find ourselves caring less about who beats who, and more about the weight of the characters themselves – a foreign concept for genre martial arts, if ever there was one.

For To, this is also as visually proficient as ever – the play between light, shadow and neon rendering Hong Kong in deep, nocturnal overtones – spaced out across a widescreen vista at times, reminiscent of a Seijin Suzuki film. And with the proliferation of "Japonism" at an all-time high thanks to fluff like Lost in Translation, it's the free-jazz nightlife aesthetic on display that feeds squarely off it. This comes to a heed during the film's mid-point highlight: a bar sequence that escalates into mass, table-breaking Judo flopping, spilling out onto the street like a fluorescent-bathed mini-riot. Accompanied by one of those loin-tingling Japanese ballads – you know, the kind Quentin Tarantino is so infatuated with – it's at these moments the film becomes a pure object of cool. Throw Down may not flaunt the testosterone, acrobatics or balletic violence to warrant an adrenaline high or a tear to the eye, but that it's different, seems an achievement in itself.