One doesn't expect much from Hong Kong productions nowadays. But have we gotten to the point that expecting good action and a decent story in a Yuen Biao film is an exercise in futility? If the clunker Fight for Love is any indication, the answer is sadly "yes".

In the movie, Yuen plays a kung fu instructor who has attracted the attention of a young music teacher (Lee Bing-Bing), who wants him to teach martial arts to one of her pupils. The two begin a bit of a romance, but it has to be put on hold, as Yuen as still dealing with demons from his past, as his former best friend was the one that ended up marrying his childhood sweetheart (Yoyo Mung).

This doesn't sound like your usual action movie plot, and I'd be fine with that if anyone involved with this picture could act. Actually, they don't do too bad of a job, but one gets the sense that the actors were really doing this more for a paycheck than anything else. The same cannot be said for the kid actor in this movie. He made me want to jab needles into my eardrums every time he spoke, and soon had me wishing for the halycon days of that brat from Rumble in the Bronx.

The extremely poor script doesn't help matters any, either. This is the type of movie that uses a lot of musical montages to pad its' running time. It even goes so far as to use the stupid "flashback within a flashback" device -- of footage we just saw minutes ago. I know good screenwriters are getting hard to find in Hong Kong these days, but this was ridiculous.

There is a very little bit of action thrown in, and it's what saves Fight for Love from coming across even worse than it does. But frankly, given how crappily the dramatic scenes are done here, even action stuff on the level of Drunken Master II or Hard-Boiled couldn't rescue this from the foul depths of B-movie hell that it's firmly entrenched in from the get-go.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]