From the Same Family
1995
Director: Johnny Lee
Stars: Roy Cheung, Frankie Lam, Michael Tse
The story of two friends growing up in Triad life. Ling Chun (Cheung) is a cool-headed kickboxing champion, and Jeff (Lam) is a hard-drinking roughneck. Together, they rise to power by controlling bars and clubs, but some of their underlings, especially the hot-headed Taky (Tse), begin to threaten business by selling drugs. Jeff wants to deal with it, but Ling lets it slide because Taky saved his life in a street fight some years before. Eventually, Taky becomes too much to handle and Ling must decide wether to take action before he loses everything.
From the Same Family is a by-the-numbers heroic bloodshed movie. There's really nothing in here that most people haven't seen many times before, so the real question is how well the film does it. Lee does a competent job of moving the action along, adding generous doses of violence and sex to give the movie a kick-start at points (there's even a Woo-ish shootout, complete with dual handguns and slow-motion), and both of the leads do a good job, but, again, there's nothing really special here. The flashback structure used in the film is somewhat unique, but Ling's Bruce Lee-isms get really annoying after a while. All in all, From the Same Family isn't really worth hunting down, but it is a somewhat pleasant way to kill a hour and a half.
RATING: 6.5