Drive. Inspector Lee's squad receives information about the whereabouts of dangerous criminal Rusty, but the operation to capture the bandit and his accomplices does not go as smoothly as one would like, and the scoundrel hides with his girlfriend. The operatives have few leads, witnesses refuse to speak, and to top it all off, it turns out that someone in the police regularly reports all the movements of police to bandits. . .
The Mafia Lair reveals some of the nuances of justice. The search, detention, interrogation and exposure of criminals is not reduced to a simple conflict of “cops – crooks”. Often the situation looks like this: a cohesive and desperate gang is confronted by a disparate team of law enforcement officers. Disparate, because some law enforcement officers are paid for the direct fight against crime, and others for the fight against illegal crime. The team of Inspector Lee is forced not only to fill the garbage in the gangster’s hut, but also to ensure that the garbage from the hut is not carried out by meticulous guys from the Internal Affairs Department. A mechanism of checks and balances, perhaps, is necessary, otherwise wait for the arbitrariness of the authorities; it is true, the mechanism is good when protecting crooked dandelions or completely innocent suspects, but their wide range of rights are enjoyed by crooked wolves. In some places, the technique of inspector Lee's operatives causes slight hostility, but still Kirk Vaughn, acquainting the viewer with the antagonists, clearly explains to the viewer the essence of the sayings "to live with wolves - to howl by wolves." There is no justice and there can be no justice, but it is definitely worth choosing an honest policeman with a lesser evil. Otherwise, organized crime will make the choice.
The speed of the plot development increases as the timekeeping progresses, and if in the first half the film travels quickly, but carefully, then in the second it squeezes the gas and rushes into all seriousness. Danny Lee, as always, is convincing in his favorite role of a lawless cop, and Anthony Vaughn embodied the scumbag on the screen much brighter than before in "Coolly Boiled". As for the action, James Ha managed to put it in such a way that the spectacle and naturalism do not contradict; the showdown in court combines classic Hong Kong kung fu-ponts with a slender turmoil, and the final slaughter is one of the coolest shootouts in the history of cinema: not at all greasy, but tense, bloody, realistic - brilliance, John Wu rests.
The best action movie of 1994, and among police fighters - one of the deepest, if not the most. Watch everyone.
7 out of 10