Stephen Fung's latest film is an action-comedy hybrid that delivers plenty of boots to the head but misses the mark one too many times to really be classic material. Made with a very mainstream audience in mind and with the hope of having 'block buster' written all over it, House Of Fury plays dumb too often for its own good, but isn't without merit.

The plot isn't overly complicated, nor are the characters. Basically, Teddy (Cat III god among men, Anthony Wong of The Untold Story) is a secret agent who finds working playing protector for retired and aging secret agents. To keep up the ruse that he's not what he seems, however, Teddy operates out of a chiropractor's office that looks like your everyday establishment on the outside but inside houses his secret agent super lair. Not much of note really happens in his secret lair, but when you're a secret agent it's always nice to have one kicking around just in case you find you need one.

Teddy has a life outside the secret agent arena, but has trouble keeping them separate. You'd think with all of his training and all of his involvement in covert operations of many different kinds would ensure that he'd keep his mouth shut about such things, but no, he likes to brag. Who does he like to brag to? His two kids, Natalie (Jillian Chung) and Nicky (Stephen Fung, the director of the film) and their friends, for the most part. Neither of Teddy's kids are all that interested in what he has to say though – with both of them in their teens, Natalie would rather hang out with her friends or her boyfriend Jason (Daniel Wu) and Nicky spends most of his time hanging out with the dolphins at the aquarium where he works. To make matters worse, they think their old man is full of it, not realizing that he really is in fact a top notch secret agent.

Teddy has to put his mediocre home life aside though, because soon an American veteran named Rocco (Michael Wong) who was put into a wheelchair for the rest of his life by a Chinese agent named Dragon comes knocking on Teddy's door looking for Dragon's address. It seems like Rocco and his son are out to settle a grudge and get revenge for what Dragon did to him all those years back. Teddy takes quite a beating from the two Americans but stays loyal to his team and doesn't spill the beans. When Teddy won't put out though, Rocco figures out a better plan to get to him – take down his kids, who happen to have microchips disguised as jewelry around their necks that contain all the information anyone could ever possibly want to know about the Chinese Secret Agents that Teddy is sworn to protect. With Teddy held captive and his kids clueless about what's going on, it looks like Rocco's plan is a sure fire winner, but Teddy and his family have got a few tricks up their sleeves and they're not going down for the count without a fight.

Alright, so the plot sounds a little silly and quite frankly, it is. All is forgivable however as this is, at its core, a comedy and then an action film. Of course, with the comedic aspects of the film and the story playing center field, you're opt to run into some goofiness. Sometimes it works really well, other times not so well, but the bulk of the humor is pretty effective even if some of it does seem to get lost a little bit in the English translation. Aside from some obvious slapstick humor, there's some clever acknowledgements to kung fu cinema's past (a certain Bruce Lee film with a rather similar name is paid tribute to… sort of) and as a comedy and a comedy alone, House Of Fury is of acceptable quality. It's hardly going to replace your favorite laugh fest of all time, but it'll make you chuckle in a few spots and laugh hard at a few more.

The real reason to see the film though, is the action. Yeah, a lot of it is obvious wirework and there's a CGI helping hand visible in a few scenes, but if you look at the big picture the fight choreography and martial arts direction, courtesy of the legendary Yuen Wo Ping, is pretty tight. It doesn't matter that some of the participants are Asian pop stars, it doesn't matter that they're not real life masters of the martial arts – what matters is that Ping's scenes do make you believe, at least in the far fetched and ridiculous context of the film, that they could be. Some of the staff fighting is fantastic, and one scene in particular involving a length of chain is also pretty remarkable. Plenty of fast punching and high kicking abounds, and when the comedy is intertwined with the fights, the movie really shines.

So while you may not necessarily picture Anthony Wong as a martial artist capable of taking on a band of white clad ninjas or think of some of the other, younger, 'poppier' cast members as hard ass fighting machines, House Of Fury still proves to be an enjoyable, light hearted action comedy mix that, even if it breaks very little new ground, is fun, entertaining stuff.

Video:

House Of Fury benefits from a very sharp and colorful 2.35.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. There's a very high level of both foreground and background detail present in the image, and the colors are bright, bold and distinct. Flesh tones look lifelike and quite natural, while black levels remain strong throughout. Print damage is pretty much non-existent (as it should be for such a recent film) and grain, while present if you're looking for it, is never problematic. The only flaws that are really noticeable, and they're minor when they occur, are some mild instances of edge enhancement and some trails in a few of the action scenes (more noticeable if you watch the movie on a PC monitor than on an actual TV, but there none the less).