The Tournament

The Tournament is one of the more disappointing film from Golden Harvest. It is one that, with all her skill and charm, Angela Mao can't save. The problems with the film are inherently structural. Writer Chuan Hua Huang-fu's one and only script is thin and incoherent. Director Feng Huang does his best at padding it out to an hour and a half. He can do it with people searching around the ruins of Sukhothai but has a harder time with footage of kickboxing.

Helped by his son, an older man sells street food from his tiny café in a rundown part of Hong Kong. He's a victim of a protection racket, and when he can't pay they kidnap his daughter. In the café is an agent looking for saps to compete in a kickboxing tournament in Bangkok. The son training in Kung-Fu thinks he can win the money to free his sister. He enlists his friend (Carter Wong). They lose, the son being killed in the ring. The man, his daughter and the kidnap are just dropped like a stone. We never hear about them again. The driving narrative has been parked in a garage, covered in a tarp and forgotten about.

A friend's father who runs the school, and every other martial artist in Hong Kong, is humiliated by the defeat. In shame he hangs himself, leaving the school vulnerable to a takeover by people who practice karate. After a fight with the karate people, his daughter, Lau Siu-fung (Angela Mao), and his son head to Thailand to regain kung-fu's honour

The plot is now a sports underdog story where the underdog just wins. There isn't even a training montage.

In another plot change, the daughter of the sports promoter that they are staying with is kidnapped for no explicable reason. Lau Siu-fung and her brother have to beat up some of the loose ends, proving that kung-fu is superior.

To be fair, Feng Huang does make good use of the time he has outdoors, with Bangkok's cityscape and Sukhothai. The majority is however bound to interiors. He and Sammo Hung film some great fight scenes using kung-fu. Kickboxing is less visually expressive and tends to become samey, excepting the part when Angela Mao gets in the ring. Mao's performance is engaging but there is nothing emotionally persistent within the film. The death of the friend has no lasting impact on the brother, neither has the death of the father on the children. The only thing that the characters care about is kung-fu being seen as inferior to other martial arts.

The Tournament feels over long, even though it only runs for an hour and a half. Four short disjointed plots are just the bones of a film without much meat on them.

This review was for the Mandarin version of the film. The American dub has bad voice acting and significantly changes the meaning of some of the dialogue.

Reviewed on: 23 Aug 2026