Underground

Directed by: Chee Keong Cheung

Starring: Mark Strange, Nathan Lewis, Leon Sua, Liang Yang, Glen Salvage, Fidel Nanton

Synopsis:

12 fighters, each with their own unique style and motives, take part in an underground fighting tournament. The tournament backers choose two fighters each and decide among themselves who to compete with. The winner receives £500,000. The losers will be lucky to leave alive.



Review:

Most “tournament” movies will focus on one individual, the hero. We the audience will learn of his background, his reasons for competing (usually some form of revenge), and we watch as he struggles to overcome adversities both in and out of the ring. In parallel, there will probably be a bad-guy who is ruthless and deadly, and we also follow his progress until the inevitable final, where the bad-guy and our hero will meet...

Underground tries a different approach. By giving all of the contestants in each round the same amount of screentime – each gets a small scene showing why they are involved – it is much more difficult to guess the outcome of the movie. There is no single narrative at work here. In fact, whilst watching it I was struck by how much structurally, it resembled the “reality contest” shows on tv, such as Masterchef or America’s Top Model, or even The Apprentice. Take the boardroom scenes – I could easily see Tyra Banks or Alan Sugar/Donald Trump sitting at that table.

Focussing on 12 different characters in a 97 minute movie doesn’t leave a lot of room for character development, and each fighter is given a moniker that acts as a short-hand cipher for each – The Ex-Convict, The Vagrant, The Foreigner, The Priest, etc. However as the tournament progresses and the contestants get whittled down, the script gives each remaining character a little bit more room to develop.

I was also struck by the amount of pathos and emotion the movie managed to convey. There is a scene following the fight between The Teacher and The Male Model which contained the sort of gravitas you just don’t expect from this sort of movie. There are similar scenes throughout, as some of the fighters take a hard look at themselves and what they are prepared to do to their opponents in order to win some cash, but that one in particular was a standout.

Each of the contestants has a different style of fighting, and the choreographers do a good job of mixing the different styles together. There are loads of different styles of kicks, grapples, punch/block combos. The fights are reasonably short, about 2-3 minutes each and with no narrative "hero” to root for, you really don’t know who’s going to win. Each fight takes place in a different location, too, which stops the movie from getting boring to look at.

There are a couple of niggles – one being the way each fight is introduced becomes very repetitive. The second isn’t so much of a problem as a discussion point. By not following a traditional narrative structure and providing the audience with a clear-cut hero to root for, it leaves the viewer to make his/her own mind up as to which fighters they want to win. When we get to the finale, does the audience have enough emotional investment in either fighter to care about the outcome?

Director Chee Keong Cheung is certainly very talented and captures the fights on screen very well. I’ll be watching/reviewing his subsequent movie (Bodyguard: A New Beginning) shortly. The actors put in very physical performances, really selling the fights, and at times providing some emotional weight to their paper-thin characters between the combat scenes. It was nice to see Glen Salvage from Left for Dead pop up as The Priest. Finally, I’d like to mention the excellent make-up fx – particularly for the consequences of the Model/Teacher and Vagrant/Ex-Convict fights.

Verdict:

Underground provides just enough characterisation and emotion between bouts to make the excellent choreography count for something, rather than being just empty spectacle. The complete absence of "wire-fu" and CGI also helps in this respect. If you can accept both the episodic nature and the different approach to narrative structure then this decent slice of British Action is worth seeking.

6 out of 10 (MikeOutWest)