Going straight to hell
By Miranda Inganni
A box office smash when it was released in Vietnam late last year, Clash (Bay Rong) premiered as the International Centerpiece at the 2010 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival on May 2nd at the Director’s Guild of America Theatre in Los Angeles.
Kicking booty and looking pretty, director Le Thanh Son’s stylized film follows Phoenix (Veronica Ngo), a woman who has lived a life of slavery in different forms, as she gathers a team of thugs – some far more capable than others -- including check (marital arts icon Johnny Tri Nguyen), in order to steal a high-tech laptop full of secret code -- yet with little in the way of security passwords to break into -- from French gangsters who just want the money for drink.
Of course, nothing goes quite according to plan and no one is quite who they seem to be. Filled with thrilling ultimate fight scenes, and plot twists, the film relies too heavily on flashbacks to tell the story. In an especially annoying sequence toward the end of the movie, the bond between Ngo and Nguyen, which we’ve just watched unfold throughout the movie, is thrust in our faces once again.
And, in case you are curious, the title has nothing to do with The Clash’s anti-Vietnam Invasion song, “Straight to Hell,” which was sampled in the song "Paper Planes" featured in Slumdog Millionaire.
