HK drama: Fist Fight (兄弟) - a review

Ok, first of all: full disclosure. If anyone has ever heard of Mat Yeung (楊明) then you may know why I like him. He’s a TVB actor with a fair few series under his belt, and apart from a little real life police trouble a while back, he’s your average TVB person. Except he’s got a Resting Bitch Face of Awesome and he’s also very easy on the eyes. Well, I think it’s his attitude to the characters he plays rather than his appearance, but still, it all helps.

Anyway, now that’s out of the way, how about I try to cover the whole emotional rollercoaster of the TVB Hong Kong drama Fist Fight (兄弟) in three words.


Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for the TVB drama FIST FIGHT!

Convoluted

tiptoe, through the meanies...

Oh my dog - you thought the mighty Marvel ‘it’s all connected ’ web of interlocking plots and subplots and hints was overly complicated? Then clearly you’ve never seen a Hong Kong drama on Speed. Much like this series, in fact. You have three blokes who couldn’t seem more disparate - one of them, Ha Tin-Hang (夏天行) played by the aforementioned Mat Yeung (楊明) is looking for any connection he can find to his real parents. This is when he’s not being very very good at his day job, which is working for a private security firm. Through no fault of his own this firm gets lumbered with protecting the arrogant and obscenely rich Fever Cheung (張非凡), played with flair and creativity by Vincent Wong (王浩信). He’s basically a gaming and web genius, who’s also very good at using social media and people to promote whatever he wants and win big. He’s not a bad person per se, but it always seems as though he’s working on something nefarious because he doesn’t see the point in trying to explain himself to others.

Add in the hot-tempered and impulsive Ho Tiht-Nam (何鐵男), played by the very capable and very bendy Philip Ng (伍允龍), a copper who’s done with all the secretive bollocks preventing him from getting evidence enough to take down proper bad guys, and you have a triumvirate who don’t seem to have very much in common other than determination.

Actual King of the Resting Bitch Face strikes again

But wait, what’s this? Tin-Hang starts to unravel a rather unsavoury plot that involves his real parents dying in a fire - or did they? Fever appears to be part of something else entirely, with his hands in many pies, but one of them is inexplicably mixed up in who set the fire that killed Tin-Hang’s parents. Tiht-Nam is out for anyone breaking rules, but the very smart Interpol agent Madam Yeung / 楊青青 (or Ching-Ching, as she’s later called by her friends) played by the awesome Rebecca Zhu (朱晨麗) stops him from making a career-wrecking arse of himself and also ends up supporting him in more than just his job. Throw in a very positive role-model in the form of Si-Ting (馬斯婷) played with amusing gusto by Kamen Kong (江嘉敏), a host of other extras and some unbelievable plot twists, and you have an exhausting yet satisfying 30 episodes. Did I say it was a drama? I was wrong; it’s an über drama. Heart attacks, early-onset dementia, shoot-outs, lying in a coma, car chases, boxing matches, ransom demands, street fights, godmothers and grandmas, VR ghosts, X Files-esque telepathy (epic twist, by the way - and a big part of what follows), family squabbles, the economic future of Hong Kong itself - even the ICAC gets a quick look-in. I think there isn’t a plot line or twist that wasn’t used in this. It certainly made it impossible to stop binge-watching, and I have to say I never knew what they were going to get away with next. And you know what? I liked it. It was like a BBC drama on res Smarties with no brakes, and it was unpredictable.

Heart-breaking

Heard you were talking shit about my Resting Bitch Face

You want long-lost brothers finding each other, only to lose them again? People finding love and having it whipped out from under them as if it’d never been? Being alone in the world, finding one person you trust, and having them taken from you so that you’re left with nothing? Basically all the cruelest twists of fate that the grumpiest, most cantankerous writer could come up with? Seriously, writers - who hurt you? Who did this to you that you had to take it out on innocent character creations for a mainstream soap / drama production? I know the old writer’s adage that you only torture the characters you like, but if that’s the case then bloody hell, you lot must have loved every single of the main cast with a fiery passion.

Everyone gets a chance to suppress their feelings for only so long, before they have to either scream and cry it out or beat the crap out of someone. Don’t worry though - the recipients totally deserved an epic beating.

Misnomer

Go ahead, ruin my jacket. Seriously, I've got like 50

So the title Fist Fight (or in Cantonese, 兄弟 - ‘hing daai’, or ‘brothers’) is basically a massive hint that a bloke or few in this series is more to the other than we know. As the mammoth, 30-episode story unfolds, we find it’s not just them that it affects - no spoilers, but if you weren’t suspicious of the two best mates that work in the gaming / tech company, then turn in your soap / drama card right now. However, seeing as it took the brothers an eternity to work out who they were and how, and then how to exist without arguing or whumping on each other, maybe a more fitting name for this series should have been ‘Fuck Me, It’s a Free-For-All’. There were allusions to people being brothers not through blood but through sacrifice and help, and at times there were some really good ideas bandied about as to how you measure what is and what is not considered a brotherly thing.

peekaboo

That’s not to say the women were left out; Interpol Madam Yeung certainly had her moments and to date she’s the only person I’ve seen use a sturdy boot heel to cock a gun because she’s been shot in the other arm and it no longer has strength enough. The young security guard who successfully fought her way into the private security job and way waaaay beyond was amusing at first but as you discover her tragic back story, you decide you can accommodate her apparently constant need for cash and to be honest, her tenacity and drive impressed me before we knew what she was really made of. The only lesser character was the boxing near-champion turned coach. To be honest, more could have been done with her character (and I hate to say it, but the actress’ accent irritated me the more I tried to ignore it and let it go). The godmother was excellent and although I suspect she was in there to provide a richer back story for Tin-Nam, at least it was a godmother this time and not another wise old granddad character.

All in all, I have to say this was an 8 out of 10; not bad at all for something that started out built on boxing matches and ended up working out who was whose family and how.

My only hope is that it did well enough to warrant a second series next year. After all, I hear they’ve just started production on ‘The Exorcist’s Meter 2 ‘, I series I really enjoyed about a year ago.

And that’s all the review that’s fit to print. Now I feel a bit lost, as I was marathoning that show 3 or 4 episodes a night. Guess I’ll see what else TVB has to offer.

For now though, soopytwist everyone.