Escape From Kingdom - No Escape From Boredom

Feb

15

Escape From Kingdom - No Escape From Boredom

≡ Category: Action, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Not Worth Your Time |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Martial Arts
Director: Addy Sung
Year: 1988

Rating:

NOT WORTH YOUR TIME

Escape From Kingdom is a terrible movie. Why? Let’s start with the casting.

The charisma challenged and all around horrible thespian Addy Sung is the star. Why on God’s green earth would anyone cast Addy Sung as the hero of an action movie?

Wait a minute. The director of Escape From Kingdom is none other than… Addy Sung. That’s why. Good old Addy also wrote the script and probably did the action choreography, both of which stink to high heaven.

Addy doesn’t surround himself with great talent, either. If I were him, and I had a big ego, I probably wouldn’t either. It would just make me look a bigger fool than I already was.

There are a few exceptions to the putrid casting. Michael Chan gets a cameo as a hit man, but he is horribly directed, both in terms of performance and action. Shum Wai is wasted in a brief walk on role. Lau Siu-Ming does the worried dad bit well enough, I guess.

Speaking of direction, Addy Sung has zero skills. His camera setups are static, he has no eye for composition, and his action direction, as already noted, is the pits. He also makes the few talented performers he has on hand look like amateurs.

What’s the story, you might ask? Daddy’s little rich girl falls in with a pimp and is sold to a brothel in Thailand. A private detective from Hong Kong sets off to rescue her.

This could be fun, but writer/director Addy Sung completely botches the concept. Logical mistakes are strewn throughout the screenplay. There’s a good twenty minutes spent lingering on the fleshpots in Thailand. It’s damned depressing, but worse, it’s boring.

Escape From Kingdom is almost entirely without merit. There’s a decent fire stunt, two or three decent stunts in which furniture is destroyed and that’s about it.

Avoid.