I've been a fan of Donnie Yen for over twenty years now and had heard that the fight action in Flashpoint was amongst his best work. I hadn't heard wrong: the hard-hitting full-contact mixed martial arts scenes are as awesome as they say.
It's a shame then that the plot for Flashpoint is so unremarkable, a routine Hong Kong police drama—cops vs triads—which introduces lots of indistinguishable characters in such quick succession that, for a while, it's hard to work out precisely who is good and who is bad.
The dull plot trundles along, with the occasional brief spot of action or brutality to spice things up, and it gradually becomes clearer who is who: Archer Sin (Ray Lui), Tony (Collin Chou) and Tiger (Yu Xing) are Korean brothers who run a smuggling operation, Sam is a gangster who has ratted on his bosses, Wilson (Louis Koo) is a plucky young undercover cop working with tough police inspector Jun Ma (Yen), and Julie (Bingbing Fan) is Wilson's really hot girlfriend. So far so mediocre.
The final third of the film, however, is a whole lot better. A non-stop, blood-soaked, showdown between Ma and the bad guys, with incredible gunplay and some of the most painful looking fight choreography I have ever seen, it is everything I had hoped for and more, leaving the viewer with a better impression of the film overall than it probably really deserves. Hence my more than reasonable rating of 7/10.
