Soi Cheang’s cinema contains many things, but outright comedy isn’t generally one of them: aside from maybe a few choice scenes in SPL II: A Time for Consequences, his films operate under genre conventions that don’t usually allow for a great deal of humor to enter the proceedings. This is just one way in which Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In stands out in his oeuvre; a long-gestating project that has passed through the hands of numerous Hong Kong luminaries, it leans further than any of Cheang’s non-Monkey King films to date into crowd-pleasing conventionality, albeit so satisfying on its own terms that it scarcely seems to matter. Much of this comes from the coherence and loving treatment of the Kowloon Walled City, and how it seems to act as a reclamation of both past cinematic representations—most obviously the nightmarish ending of Long Arm of the Law, but maybe even the prologue of the re-edited Days of Being Wild—and of a space and industry lost in time. Similar to SPL II, the action is tighter and the sense of place is more deeply felt than the norm, with Hawksian dynamics leading the way, especially early on as our hero Lok (Raymond Lam) initially takes refuge by sleeping on corrugated metal eaves, sustained by the generosity of the city’s inhabitants as overseen by legendary martial artist Cyclone (Louis Koo). The film mixes in Koo and other luminaries—Sammo Hung, Richie Jen, Aaron Kwok—with Lam and other lesser-known cast members reasonably well, relying on Koo’s star power and the latter group’s likability (especially once Lok completes a quartet of younger martial artists) to establish this location as a melting pot of personalities and quiet camaraderie before the forces of the past come to tear things down.

Despite its confined, urban setting, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In comes to feel like something of an epic, along the lines of Leone or even this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, one of this year’s other worthy action extravaganzas, considering how much it is striving to embody something of the spirit of a particular time. Where Cheang comes in is the particularity and specificity of his images, and in the extremes to which his narrative pushes by the end. It’s ultimately apt that the closing credits play over a series of past images from the film, not of the dazzling fights, but of the quiet scenes of community building and daily living, a reminder of all the bloodshed and sacrifice needed to maintain such a city.