“The Scavenger” Poster
If you’ve caught Liu Fengchao as a superkicker villain in recent action films like Black Storm and Wings of Dread on the Chinese streaming service iQIYI, chances are you’d be eager to see the award-winning Wushu athlete receive his own starring vehicle. Well, we’ve got a bit of a Monkey’s Paw situation here, because 2026 brings the release of an action-packed modern day thriller in which Liu Fengchao’s martial arts skills are front and center…but I’m also forced to ask director Qin Pengfei: did this have to be a scuzzy drama about sexual exploitation in the music industry too? Despite featuring two or three of the best fight scenes I’ve seen all year, including a parking garage scrap worthy of a South Korean gangster flick, The Scavenger is often so damn unpleasant outside of the moments when Fengchao is throwing punches that I’m a bit hesitant to give it an outright recommendation.
No doubt Qin Pengfei is one of the best action directors working today, but his films do often lean on themes of human trafficking and sexual coercion as a shorthand to quickly establish the kind of bad guys that you instantly loathe. At this point, such themes are almost par for the course when you’re watching an Asian action flick, with The Furious being another recent example, but I’d argue The Scavenger takes things into seedier territory than we typically see for this kind of picture. For instance, there’s a wholly unnecessary subplot about one of the main bad guy’s slimy underlings who collects sexual blackmail on his boss, in part so he can get off to it in his little voyeur’s command center. (Not something that I needed to see, Qin Penfei!). Even though there’s not anything particularly graphic onscreen, The Scavenger still feels like the kind of picture that makes you want a cold shower afterwards. (It’s ironic that some Americans on Twitter will spend all day arguing that the entertainment industry is secretly run by sexual deviants, whereas the Chinese straight-to-streaming industry is just like, ‘yup, there’s no secret about it.’ I also had to wonder if the filmmakers aren’t using this storyline to cast aspersions on the K-Pop industry).
Fortunately for those of us who just want to watch Liu Fengchao defy gravity onscreen, the sordid elements of the movie do largely diminish in the second half of The Scavenger, which is also right when the action ramps up. This is the kind of film where Qin Pengfei can cheekily stage an unseen fight scene behind two closed elevator doors as a gag and you’re not mad at missing anything because the rest of the movie simply has so much damn action, including that aforementioned parking garage brawl, a highlight which perhaps serves as an homage to modern Korean favorites like Park Hoon-jung’s New World.
Liu Fengchao’s fighting style in this film feels rather unique too; to my layman’s eyes, it appears to be a mixture of Judo-like throws with dynamic Mixed Martial Arts techniques and a bit of raw street fighting, including an unholy amount of bone breaking and wrist snaps. (Seriously, I haven’t seen this much bone breaking since Steven Seagal was several pounds lighter and asking if anybody knew why Richie did Bobby Lupo). I suspect there’s a bit of an influence from The Furious here as well; even though that film didn’t receive a wide theatrical release until a few months ago, its festival premiere was in late 2025, and seeing as how The Furious actor Xie Miao remains one of Qin Pengfei’s top collaborators, it wouldn’t surprise me if the director was able to catch the film much earlier than the rest of us. Needless to say, if you’re a fan of what choreographers Kenji Tanagaki and Kensuke Sonomura pulled off in The Furious, you’ll be similarly dazzled by the action on display here, including our hero’s scraps with a hammer-wielding, red-haired baddie played by Liang Dongyu (The Butcher’s Blade) and another with a homicidal female nurse with a literal axe to grind (Black Storm’s Sun Cailun).
Now if only the rest of the movie was as entertaining as all the sequences that put Liu Fengchao into motion. Unfortunately, the moments in between the action tend to be off-putting—there are only so many times you can watch Huang Tao’s bad guy beat or coerce the women in his orbit—particularly in the movie’s first half, to the point that I can’t really rate this one any higher, even though I want fight fans to know that The Scavenger offers at least a few of the finest action sequences that all of 2026 has to offer. I’ll let you decide if that’s worth investing in all 90 minutes of this film—or if you simply want to check out that parking garage fight on Twitter, where I’ve already seen it circulate.
Z Ravas’ Rating: 6.5/10
I’ve mentioned a bunch of times before that I’m put off by the sleazy exploitative undertones of these web movies. Even though it’s not explicit, the way it’s been portrayed in Blind War, the Fight Against Evil series, and Sin Trade looks like those scenes are meant to be enjoyed by certain people in the audience. Even though the bad guys lose in the end, it doesn’t feel like the hero is fighting for the victims. It’s feels like “You’re the bad guy, *punch, kick, punch*”
If it’s worse in The Scavenger, I may just have to skip to the fight scenes. I’m not a prude, I just think that such subject matter should be portrayed more considerately. Even most of the HK classics came across as more mindful.
I saw someone on Letterboxd who put it more eloquently than I did, basically saying that often in the 2026 crop of iQIYI action movies, the scenes of women being abused “go on too long and get to a point of feeling sneering as opposed to admonishing.” The filmmakers end up wallowing in the scenes that degrade women characters, almost as though they’re targeting a segment of the audience that might enjoy such scenes, rather than merely illustrating the idea and moving on to the part where the hero delivers just punishment. It can also get to the point where it’s unrealistic: I’m not sure Liu Fengchao’s little sister would be able to survive what her character endures in this movie.
I think you’re right that the HK classics, as trashy as some of them could be, knew how to succinctly establish ‘this dude is really evil’ and then get on with the rest of the movie.
Thank you for sharing that quote. That hits the nail on the head for how I feel about many of these films.
When people are able to look past that and enjoy the recent iQiyi films, I don’t think ill of them. I’m just more upset that I can’t see the quality that they see.
Even 6.5 might be too generous for this movie. There’s a mismatch between the overly choreographed action scenes that go on forever which is tonally cartoonish with no blood or damage to the bad guys. On the other hand we have frankly way too graphic violence against the female characters bordering torture porn.
As with all movies in China, its part entertainment, part PSA, part propaganda. When you leave China for a vacation, passport control explicity ask you why are you going to SE Asia because these countries are deemed unsafe for Chinese and this is represented in all these iqiyi movies set in crime ridden fake SE Asian cities.
In China where Kpop depsite being partially banned is way bigger than the domestic music scene espeically young women. This movie does a 2 for 1 by serving as a warning that seeking fame and fortune andleaving your home you will result in you being exploited. I’m not sure this will get the women in China having babies but the government is desperate and will try anything to get fertility rates up!!!