As the Hong Kong film industry has been devoured by Mainland China, drawing its stars and directors away with the promise of big budgets and even bigger audiences, a vacuum has formed in the action genre. Audiences around the world need to see stuntmen recklessly risk their bodies and lives for the sake of cheap thrills, and if Hong Kong isn’t going to provide that anymore, then we’re just going to have to go elsewhere to look for it. The 2000s saw the emergence of a Thai industry centered around Tony Jaa (Ong-Bak, The Protector), while a few years later cottage industries sprung up in Indonesia around Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, and Timo Tjahjanto (The Raid, The Night Comes for Us), and Vietnam around Johnny Tri Nguyen and Veronica Ngô (Clash, The Rebel). These Southeast Asian action films revolved around remarkable stuntwork propping up familiar genre formulas, as opposed to bigger industries like Korea and India, which incorporated the flashier elements of Hong Kong style into their more established cinematic formulae and traditions.
Over the last 15 years, most of those new stars were scooped up by Hollywood or other industries: Tony Jaa’s best recent work has come in Hong Kong; Uwais, Ruhian, and Ngô, appeared in Star Wars movies; Tjahjanto’s last film was the Bob Odenkirk fight film Nobody 2; Le Van Kiet, who directed Ngo in Furie, made The Princess, starring Joey King, for Hulu, while Johnny Tri Nguyen hasn’t appeared in a film since Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, back in 2020 (which also featured Ngô). But the industries keep rolling, even without that initial wave of stars. Just at this year’s iteration of IFFR, for instance, we’ve seen the Indonesian/Japanese hybrid Lone Samurai and the Vietnamese war film Tunnels, two of the better action films of the past year and well-deserving of a wider audience in the U.S. Fish, Fists and Ambergris joins them as an action-comedy in the Hong Kong style, with a distinctly handmade flavor.
Directed by Dương Minh Chiến, Fish/Fists appears to be the debut feature of a collective of stunt performers. It concerns a small fishing village in the south of Vietnam and their statue of a whale. The whale is made of ambergris and is thought to bring luck to the villagers. Its shrine is guarded by a martial artist named Tam, played by Quang Tuấn, who also starred as the mysterious mechanic obsessed with making things explode in Tunnels. One day, his younger brother, back from Saigon for a visit, steals the idol and takes it to town in order to pay off his gambling debts, so Tam and his friend Hoang (Hoàng Tóc Dài, one of the three credited choreographers on the film, billed as “Action 3”) head into the city to get it back. There they meet a former villager turned fish saleswoman (Nguyên Thảo), and the three of them spend the rest of the film brawling with gangsters and trying to reform the prodigal brother and bring him and the idol home.
Fish/Fists boasts a simple plot with plenty of goofy humor, and its visual character is bright and colorful, even in its night scenes. In this way, it feels more like a classic HK Lunar New Year action-comedy than any movie this writer has yet seen out of Southeast Asia, where the jokes are silly, the sound effects cartoonish, and the fights as spectacular as they are almost entirely bloodless. Speaking of, said fights in Fish, Fists and Ambergris are, for the most part, variations on the trope of one or two men against an army of gangsters armed with knives and lead pipes, and the stunt crew is creative enough that these brawls never feel repetitive. Instead, they incorporate the environments — a couple of big warehouses filled with junk, but also a beach, a fish market, and a motorbike chase down narrow streets — into the choreography in unexpected ways, while also keeping the action legible at all times. The group tumults are fast and complex, incorporating a variety of martial arts styles in an agreeably hybrid version of chaotic street fighting, with a ton of extremely painful-looking stunts (to which the credit sequence blooper reel further attests). It’s no surprise that the film was a big hit in Vietnam, nor that a distributor was daring enough to release it in North American theatres at the same time as its IFFR run. Audiences would do well to seek it out.
DIRECTOR: Dương Minh Chiến; CAST: Quang Tuấn, Hoàng Tóc Dài, Nguyên Thảo; DISTRIBUTOR: Eastern Edge Films; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 3.
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