Second Life

My Rating: ★★★★★

Second Life [重见天日] is a Chinese action/martial arts movie that was released on 15 August 2024.

About

Via iQiyi:
“28 years ago, Liang gives birth to a boy named “Little Bean Jelly” in prison. When the kid turns one, the mother and son lose contact. Years later, Green Dragon Group’s henchman “Ghost” is ambushed during a mission and becomes blind. When Liang is released from prison, she meets Ghost. One wants only to complete the assassination, while the other wants to make amends to rebuild their mother-son relationship. By an unexpected combination of circumstances, this mother and son help each other redeem themselves and return to the right path.”

Cast

Yuen Qiu [元秋] as Liang
She is now 76 years old and is still amazingly agile on screen.

Philip Ng [伍允龙] as Little Bean Jelly
A Hong Konger who has a martial studio in the US, we always enjoy his performances and martial arts.
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Review

Finding this film was an unexpected pleasure; two of our favourite Hong Kong actors appearing in a film side-by-side. The last time we saw them both together was on A Fist Within Four Walls, a 2016 TVB drama.

This film appeared to give Yuen Qiu a different style of character than we’ve seen her in before, more serious and with real emotions. She gave an outstanding performance not only from an acting perspective but martial arts too. I expect there was a lot of stunt stand ins but even setting the scenes up she must have been very agile to do that.

There was a lot of martial arts action in the film; quite lengthy, dramatic and unique. A lot of the scenes were comedic, and that started right from the beginning in the prison scene.

The story was good. The characters developed over time. There were some surprise twists. They did everything to bring in the audience to feel for the Mother and her situation with scenes going back to the past intertwined throughout the movie.

We spotted other actors that were familiar from Hong Kong and Chinese films.

Summary

I will give this film a 5/5, it was just brilliant. The lowest score I’ve seen is 7.8 out of 10 on Dramalist and highest 9.8 on iQiyi. It’s well worth a watch.