The Fire Raven

Any word on what the big Lunar New Year movies are this year? There was actually a Chinese-language preview attached to this - something about crime being so rare in a certain town that the police station is targeted for elimination, so the cops start committing small crimes to save their jobs - but the bit with the title went by very fast. The holiday comes relatively late this year and there haven't been a whole lot of Chinese releases reaching Boston recently (it wasn't that long ago that something would grab a screen the same day as a new Star Wars movie a week before Christmas!), so it's been a really quiet where Chinese films are concerned lately. Resurrection has been the most prominent Chinese film in America, and that's from the art-house channel rather than the mainstream one.

The Fire Raven seems to be the biggest New Year's Eve movie in China this year, although Western movies are unusually competitive in that market right now, as Zootopia 2 is a juggernaut and Avatar 3 a pretty big deal. It's playing kind of lousy slots at Boston Common, either very early or very late in the day, and on top of that, after I reserved my seat, the AMC app was kind of flaky about showing the ticket: It would show as a slot taken on in the A-List section, but wouldn't be in my tickets. I had to bring up the email I got sent, which was strange.

Worth catching if that fits your schedule and you like weird action/mystery things, though.


Ni Sha (The Fire Raven aka Hidden Kill)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 January 2026 in AMC Boston Common #17 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Not having seen a trailer - a common occurrence with Chinese movies, which will often show up in America without a whole lot of English-language promotion - and having associated writer/director Sam Quah Boon-Lip more closely with another series of crime movies than he maybe should be, I was expecting something pretty different: One of those grim movies set in Thailand or a Thailand-like places but where everyone is ethnically Chinese and speaking Mandarin which allows for more grisly crimes and corrupt cops than something set in China. Instead, it plays like something adapted from a larger-than-life manga, a big screwy adventure that careens out of control at times.

(It's fair to be confused, though - his film Wu Sha, or Sheep Without a Shepherd in English, spawned Wu Sha 2 and Wu Sha 3, which are similar premises and also star Yang Xiao, but are separate stories, while Quah has also directed two films named "Mo Sha", the latter arriving in America as "A Place Called Silence", and this is "Ni Sha" in Mandarin, though, for all I know, these are all different symbols.)

It takes place in the fictitious "Doma City" and what appears to be the near future, just before the local holiday of "Crowmoot" and a local election, which will be influenced by the Air and Ventilation Taxes being levied on the literal Undercity. The crow the camera follows to start the film leads the audience to the murder of Talaura (Huang Yi), a shady talent agent, by someone wearing a crow mask. Lead detective Fang Zhengnan (Janine Chang Chun-Ning) recognizes the sketchbook left at the scene as one drawn by her foster brother Tianyang (Peng Yuchang) when he witnessed a murder on a train 15 years ago while he and Zhengnan hid from conductors. To Zhengnan's partner Edward (Wang Xun), that makes Tianyang the prime suspect, but Tianyang's "eagle eye" for detail finds discrepancies, leading them to believe that someone is trying to avenge that murder, with fight promoter Shang Zhan (Alan Aruna) and gangster Tongcai (Hai Yitian) likely next on the hit list.

Tianyang also has a prosthetic leg that can do some pretty neat tricks, and the attempt on Shang's life is larger-than-life in an almost slapstick way that may, admittedly, have been more delightful considering that I was expecting a far more dour movie. Quan often seems like he's got a notecard file filled with elevated action world-building details that he's stitching together because this is not the sort of thing he's known for and he might not get another chance, and sometimes it can be a lot of fun - the way one of Talaura's accomplices gets taken out is hilarious cartoon violence - but sometimes it can just be a lot: The 15 years earlier segments have 15 years earlier segments of their own, and a lot of revelations tend to feel kind of random, in that you see that, sure, this character has been around and could slot into that position, but Quan's script usually has to flash back to even make you notice them rather than make one immediately realize that this fits. Chekhov's bionic leg sits on the mantel for what seems like a good long while.

It's still kind of fun, in large part because Chang Chun-Ning and Peng Yuchang are allowed to hit the ground running, with Quan presenting this pair as folks who have apparently solved other cases together, with what feels like a natural pre-existing vibe and upbeat, energetic attitudes despite the fact that the story shovels tragic backstories and an environment that can grind one down. They're charismatic problem-solvers who work well together, with enough folks like Wang Xun, Xu Jiao, Huang Xiaoming, Hai Yitian providing color as supporting characters to offset a couple guys in important spots who can be kind of bland.

The visuals and action are a good time as well. The design of this world tends toward the colorful and poppy rather than just sleek black or run-down brown, and there's a bit of willingness to push the effects past seamless if it will look cool. Chang Chung-Ning and the stunt team acquit themselves well enough when asked to get into a fight, although sometimes the action feels like a few more takes and resources might have made it better; for example, there's a point in a car chase when barrelling through tunnels full of construction has gotten two vehicles tangled in the same plastic mesh and the audience has barely had time to wonder what they're going to do with this before it's over. There's also a pretty decent train-based climax which feels like coming full circle on top of how setting an action sequence on a train makes it 23% better most of the time.

There's also an extended, impressively violent epilogue that, for as good as its best bits of mayhem are, tends to underline how Quan is seemingly trying to cram a lot of bits into one movie, and he also seems to have pushed the Chinese censors about as far as they're willing to go in terms of a killer not getting properly punished, even in sort-of-Malaysia rather than the mainland to the point where one might remember the intertitles tut-tutting about vigilantism as much as anything else. This isn't exactly surprising - Sheep without a Shepherd worked in large part because it leaned into how a viewer wanted folks to get away with something - and I hope he's got more chances to do fun adventure as opposed to gloomy crime, whether that's making this into the series it seemingly should be or not.