Almost A KO
Emerging director Chan Tai-lee gives veteran Patrick Tam his best role in years – and still lets him get beat up.
Fight for Tomorrow
Director: Chan Tai-lee • Writer: Chan Tai-lee
Starring: Patrick Tam, Locker Lam, Mark Cheng, Ying Chi-yuet
Hong Kong • 1hr 41mins
Opens Hong Kong June 19 • IIB
Grade: B
Chan Tai-lee’s Fight for Tomorrow | 拼命三郎 is, for the most part, the daddy issues sports drama you think it’s going to be – operative words there “for the most part.” The second in what Chan hopes will be a Tomorrow Trilogy, Fight is grounded in the hoary machinations of a father reconnecting with his estranged son, helping him train up for a self-defining athletic contest of some kind and healing them both in the process. Yawn. But the funny thing is Chan does a pretty decent job of bending the formula to his will and wringing a solid drama about lost time, regret, redemption and moving on out of the familiar fabric. The film’s been a while coming; it first screened at HKAFF back in 2024, but there’s no reason to fear disaster awaits from a distributor is trying to sweep it away. Chan cut his teeth as a screenwriter – he contributed to Wilson Yip’s Ip Man franchise – and finally made his directorial debut with Tomorrow is Another Day, which mined the little details of life in public housing surrounded by gossips and idiots for its mother-special needs son drama – and he applies that intimate eye to the storytelling here. It would be easy to toss Fight on the pile with other recent sports dramas like One Second Champion, One More Chance and YOLO, but it’s less sentimental and more emotionally observant than any of those.
And it stars with underrated perpetual second-stinger and punching bag (seriously this guy gets the shit kicked out of him all the time) Patrick Tam Yiu-man as Shek Sam-long, a washed up petty gangster working as a shady as shit parking valet after getting out or prison. Sam-long got stung with an eight-year bit for his old boss, Lee Man-sei (veteran Mark Cheng Ho-nam) and now toils in the shadows, living in a noisy rooftop flat, his dreams of opening his own nightclub long since dead. One night after a street fight (because of course), Sam-long finds himself in a holding cell at the local cop shop with his son, Shek Tau (Locker Lam Ka-hei, impressive in a pre-Cesium Fallout and Smashing Frank performance) AKA Stone, who really wants nothing to do with what he considers an absentee father. But as it goes in movies, they eventually get to talking again after Sam-long bails Stone out of jail and discovers he’s a budding Muay Thai fighter, and a pretty good one. What better way to bond than through training for a big tournament?
As it happens, Stone was in lock-up for defending himself against a bully of a fellow gym rat, David Lee (singer Ying Chi-yuet), another Muay Thai fighter who’s likely to be Stone’s opponent in the forthcoming tourney. Also as it goes in movies, David is Man-sei’s son. Who’d have guessed? Needless to say there is a lot of lying, cheating, reckoning, coming-of-age, reconciliation and catharsis for all involved, with a dose of excellent boxing action and some good ol’ fashioned Hong Kong crime bust-ups on the side, particularly a glass-smashing face-off between Sam-long and Man-sei.
Two things Fight for Tomorrow most definitely has going for it: a blessed lack of firm resolution for the main players and a stand-out performance by Tam, who probably hasn’t been this compelling since Beast Cops. I mean, he’s always good value and usually makes whatever he’s in a little bit better (Raging Fire, Where the Wind Blows) but Chan’s given him a real character to chew on – one part dad trying to make up for lost time and one part allegory for Hong Kong; it was written during the lost years of 2019-20. Throw in a supporting cast that includes some of the city’s sturdiest actors (Ben Yuen Foo-wah, Sherming Yiu Lok-yee, Law Lan and Lo Wing-cheong) and Chan’s delivered an unsurprising but genuine family drama that knows how to make its tropes work for it rather than against it – or in spite of it. Bring on part three.