Arguably the most popular actor in Hong Kong at the moment, Donnie Yen's journey to the top has been a rocky road. After a promising start, Yen had the stigma of not being a box office draw and gained a reputation of being hard to work with, leading him to having to appear in a series of low-budget productions to pay the bills, such as 1999's City of Darkness.

Actually, despite Yen's top billing and prominence on the cover art, he's only in City of Darkness for about fifteen minutes. The real stars of the movie are a trio of teenagers and an incredibly annoying bratty kid who are trying to find a treasure left behind by their father. Triads (led by Ngai Sing) are also after the loot, and so it's up to supercop Ozone (our boy Donnie) to save the day.

There is no credited screenwriter for this film, and after sitting through the DVD, that fact is not shocking in the least. City of Darkness seems to be working under the "flying paper" style, where the story and dialogue are pretty much made up on the fly. Things uttered in one scene don't connect to the next, which, when combined with this movie's atrociously translated subtitles, is going to leave your average English-speaking audience member vigorously scratching their head in a state of perplexion.

Thankfully, though, as the better low-budget martial arts productions will tend to do, the film-makers wisely place City of Darkness' emphasis on fisticuffs, and a lot of them. Most of Donnie Yen's relatively short appearances in the movie revolve around him popping into a scene, busting some bad guys' heads, and then going off to do some more pull-ups. This isn't Yen's best work by a long shot -- there is too much in the way of camera trickery such as under-cranking used -- but seeing him go toe to toe with guys like Billy Chow and Ngai Sing make City of Darkness worth the price of admission.

RATING: 6