Review: Old school kung fu and Sammo Hung is something that goes together so perfectly. Mixing traditional kung fu, comedy and drama, Sammo Hung delivers again an excellent Kung fu classic movie. Even if the movie might not be ground breaking, it still has everything that we love so much about these movies but it also has a lot of things to dissociate it from the average old school kung fu movie. A surprising story, with great plot twists, great characters, very good fight sequences and of course the usual touch of humor from Sammo, make this movie an entertainment fest for any kung fu fanatic.

Of course the movie carries all those old school clichés like the typical evil laugh from the bad guy, the "I'm dead… Haha no I'm not!" trickery and "your kung fu is no good I will kill you" insult, everything is there. But still, I think that this is what people are expecting from this type of movie anyway. It is probably also because of these typical clichés that we like these movies so much. Surprisingly the story was excellent, this is far from your average kung fu story were the bad guy just wants to kill the good guy because he got his ass kicked by him in front of their wannabe girl friend… or something like that. They really took care to build an interesting story, still about revenge, but containing a few great and unexpected surprises that are really welcome.

Sammo Hung, who also directed the movie, is not really the main character of the movie but still a very important one. This time he shares the screen with Leung Kar Yan. Both are excellent in their respective role. Sammo's character was the funny guy and Leung played the more serious kung fu master, so they both completed each other very well. Sammo's physical abilities were fully displayed on screen, lot of long and elaborated fight sequences using hand techniques, flips, throwing and sweeps. Still young and very agile at that time, The Victim is probably one of Sammo Hung best movies; he has a chance to really show how great his martial arts skills are.

As for his partner Leung Kar Yan, it still amaze me that this guy never had any martial arts training before starting his movie career. He can do very long hand techniques flawlessly and his stand and kicking ability show great control, as if he practiced martial arts since he was young. Some of the more complex flips and stunts were executed by a double of course, but this guy still impressed me very much. Great acting ability and probably the best fake martial art artist I have seen on screen, Leung Kar Yan just can't pass without being noticed and The Victim is considered by many one of his best movie. As for the bad guys, we don't see that much about the group of villains and their leader, but it was just your ordinary group of evil bad guys. Still it was fun to see them get their asses kicked by Sammo and Leung. In general, most of the characters were very cliché and typical for this type of movie, but this is what I expected from an old school kung fu movie and I love these kind of characters anyway.

Since it is a Sammo Hung movie, you already know that the fights are going to be excellent. Most of the fights sequences are based on traditional kung fu so don't expect any incredible move with wires here. There's a lot of very long and complex fighting sequence during the whole movie, specially the ending, a 15 min of non-stop fighting. There's also a couple of fight using weapons but it was most of the time only kicking and punching. There's also a small dose of comedy and it mostly comes from Sammo's character. Even if the jokes were maybe not always very funny, it was still a nice touch to make a great balance between the more serious moments.