Leng Feng (Jing Wu, who also directed) is a sniper who defies a direct order and takes out a drug dealer. He is immediately imprisoned but is quickly pardoned so he can become a “Wolf Warrior”, who are described as the “Special Forces inside the Special Forces”. To get acquainted with his new team, Leng and the other Wolf Warriors go out on training maneuvers in the middle of nowhere. Since the Wolf Warriors don’t have the benefit of live ammo, the drug dealer’s big brother sees this as the perfect opportunity to get revenge, so he sends his right-hand man “Tomcat” (Scott Adkins) and his team of mercenaries to kill Leng and his new comrades.
Wolf Warrior has a simple, seemingly can’t-miss premise, but it’s a pretty hollow and cheap actioner in just about every way. The action is rather dreadful, and the fight scenes are poorly choreographed and/or rushed. It doesn’t help that we are saddled with a bland hero (who is a sniper, which doesn’t leave much time for a lot of hand-to-hand action) or the fact that we have to sit through a lot of gratuitous pro-China propaganda right smack dab in the middle of the flick.
The cheapest bit comes when the Wolf Warriors find themselves surrounded by the sorriest looking pack of CGI wolves I’ve seen outside of a SyFy Channel flick. I was kind of hoping Jing would’ve got bitten by one of the wolves and turned into a literal Wolf Warrior. I guess that was just too much to ask for.
Naturally, I only watched this because Scott Adkins played the villain’s henchman. Sadly, he isn’t given a whole lot to do. I will say that whatever pulse the movie has is courtesy of his presence onscreen. Even then, his fight sequences are way too brief to make much of an impact either way. Although he is afforded the luxury of a decent death scene, overall, his final confrontation with Wu is lackluster. It’s bad enough when American productions waste Scott Adkins’ talents. It’s even worse when we import foreign productions that can’t properly utilize his skills.
I think you're wrong about this film, the action was damn good and the fight scenes were well done.
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