“Black Storm” Poster
When China’s now ubiquitous web-movie scene first appeared in the mid-2010’s, it would be a hard sell to believe that such productions would eventually lead to a resurgence of the contemporary setting martial arts movie. Back then they mostly consisted of cheap looking wuxia movies and even cheaper monster flicks, however it was arguably 2021’s Fight Against Evil that made fans of HK style action sit up and take notice. The resurgence is popularly attributed to Qin Pengfei, a former wushu practitioner who entered the film industry in 2005 as a stuntman. In 2019 he made the transition to director, and while Fight Against Evil was only his third movie, it proved to be a winning combination. Said combination was the casting of former child actor Xie Miao as a determined cop, and villains involved in the kind of criminal activity that was doing the rounds on the news at the time of release – in this case, an illegal online gambling syndicate.
In 2024 Pengfei would enlist another former child actor known for their kung-fu talents in the form of Ashton Chen, casting him as the lead in the period kung-fu movie The Drunken Prodigy. Things move fast in the web-movie world though, so in the same year it seems Pengfei realised that his sweet spot is in more contemporary surroundings. If the theory is true, then you could say that if Xie Miao got his time to shine in Fight Against Evil (which has since spawned 2 sequels), Chen got his equivalent outing with Black Storm. Same template – he plays a morally upstanding cop determined to catch the bad guys, and the villain of the piece is a greedy property developer, one who’s pocketed government funds intended for residents who need to be rehoused due to their home’s demolition.
I admit one of my curiosities about contemporary Chinese action movies is always the little nuances they apply to ensure they don’t run afoul of the sensors. This is nothing new, as even the likes of the mid-2000’s Donnie Yen movies Sha Po Lang and Flash Point both set themselves in 1997 Hong Kong, specifically to make it clear the story unfolds when the police were still under British rule rather than Chinese. In recent web movies we’ve had settings that involve made up Southeast Asian countries like Manulla (Blind War) and Wusuli (Hunt the Wicked), and if they are set in China, filmmakers need to get even more creative.
For Black Storm onscreen text tells us the story is set in 2017, a year recent enough to feel completely random, sending me on a mission to find out what happened after 2017 that meant the story could only be set then? Turns out in 2018 China passed the Supervision Law that expanded the reach of its anti-corruption investigations, the result of which saw many property developers convicted for embezzlement, effectively (at least in web movie terms) putting an end to any such scenarios ever happening again. So there you go, useless information that I’m sure no other review for Black Storm has mentioned!
Much like in The Sin Trade which would come 2 years later, here Chen plays a cop who gets called back to his hometown due to one of the locals going missing. In this case it’s a resident who was one of the last holdouts to refuse relocation from his family home, which includes his mother’s grave. With the house ransacked and the mothers grave desecrated, the villagers turn to Chen for assistance in getting to the bottom of what happened. Of course, pending permission from the local police authorities to get involved, Chen duly obliges and finds all roads point to a local big shot karaoke establishment owner played by Bao Beier (The Four trilogy).
While many fans of HK’s golden era of action have celebrated the way Pengfei’s productions hark back to the territories glory days, the more I watch of them the more I feel they’re not just an updated version of the mid-1980’s to mid-1990’s HK action aesthetic, but rather they have their own distinct identity. Far from the bright lights of Hong Kong, Pengfei’s productions are often set in grimy towns that still cling on to the traditions of old, often clashing with the more capitalist leanings of modern China. They’re locations we’re used to seeing in the likes of Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but rarely in the context of a straightforward action movie.
The rough around the edges surroundings make for a welcome change, and Pengfei consistently proves he knows how to take advantage of them. Here he continues to work with Jian Shi and Yi Wang, even if the credits make it a little confusing as to what their exact roles are – in the opening credits Shi is credited as the action director, however in the closing credits it’s Wang credited in the same role, with Shi billed as the fight choreographer. Credit continuity semantics aside, the trio also worked together with Chen on The Drunken Prodigy, with Wang additionally handling the fight action on Pengfei’s Curbing Violence from the same year. Within a very short timeframe Pengfei has grained a reputation for staging brutal fight scenes within confined spaces (the inflight bathroom fight from Wings of Dread is a highlight), and much of the action on display here is a testament to the reputation being a deserved one.
A mid-runtime fight between Chen and two assailants in a hospital elevator is up there with any of the best elevator fight scenes, with the male and female attackers feeling like a subtle nod to Baseball Boy and Hammer Girl from The Raid 2. However the MVP of almost any web movie he turns up in belongs to Liu Fengchao, who thankfully has gotten to headline his own production since Black Storm’s release with 2026’s The Butcher’s Blade, and here is no different. Playing the bodyguard of Bao Beier, his mostly mute performance sees him munching on a bao bun in practically every scene he’s in (including when the fists start to fly!), with a gnarly meat hook being his weapon of choice. After a brief tussle early on, the pair eventually find themselves facing off in a knock down, drag out fight that starts off in an illicit clubs dressing room and ends on the rooftop, taking in everywhere in-between.
There’s a clear influence of Kensuke Sonomura’s choreography style (who thankfully got his own opportunity to work on a Chinese production recently with The Furious) in the fight action, but it’s never derivative, and ultimately the action on display is distinctive enough to have its own identity. An early fight takes place in a massage parlour, in which the fact the bad guy is covered in massage oil is smartly incorporated in a way I haven’t seen before (at least not in a massage parlour setting!). More importantly though, and something that personally I felt was missing from a production like The Furious (I’ll get ready to duck the rotten tomatoes), is that there’s a sense of becoming more exhausted and hurt as the fights progress, incorporating a level of desperation and scrappiness into them the longer they go on for.
The eventual showdown between Chen and Beier certainly gets an award for the most unique location for a final fight – a pollock farm! It’s even preceded by an impressively staged car crash. How is it that big budget productions manage to stage completely unconvincing CGI car crashes, but a web movie like this one could afford to send a real vehicle flying through the air!? It’s a satisfying showdown that sees slow motion sparingly used to capture some of the more wince inducing impacts, with the scenery chewing Beier giving as good as he gets against Chen’s determined efforts to arrest him, even when such efforts involve flying kicks to the face.
With Black Storm Pengfei has struck a healthy balance between crime procedural and kung-fu beatdown, and half the fun is spotting some of his influences – at one point we get a scene that keeps cutting to Beier villainously dancing alone in his office, an obvious nod to Ray Lui’s similar scene in Flash Point, and in another we get a unique riff on the horses head in a bed from The Godfather (you’ll know it when you see it!). But more than anything, we’re here to see Ashton Chen punch and kick his way to justice, and to that end, Black Storm delivers the goods.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10
