Cung Le to star in “heroic bloodshed movie”

Todd Brown, the wizard behind the awesome offbeat movie site Twitch, passed along a message about a film he’s involved with called Breaking Point, which will star Cung Le in his first significant starring role. Here’s the official plot description:

In this action-packed thriller, former DEA agent and recent ex-con Vu Ton (Cung Le) travels to Vietnam to bury his father. Once there, Vu meets business mogul Daniel Park and learns that Daniel is married to Vu’s ex-wife, Lily. Daniel offers Vu a position as bodyguard to Lily and her daughter, Nina, but Vu refuses until Lily tells him that he is Nina’s father. When a business rival with criminal ties firebombs Daniel’s house and kidnaps Lily and Nina, Vu is forced into action.

Sound pretty generic in a straight-to-DVD kind of way, the kind of thing that Wesley Snipes would be involved with (except he’s not Asian), and I’d dismiss it entirely except for a couple of things.

One, I actually think Cung Le has a charismatic screen presence. I thought his Alien-meets-Resident Evil deep space horror flick Pandorum was a “more-than-above-average thrillride” and that on a scale from one to ten, Le’s performance “comes in around a Chuck Norris-circa-Code of Silence level six.” In short, Pandorum could’ve used more of him, and Breaking Point will have the Strikeforce fighter front and centre.

Two, I trust Brown’s opinion. He’s read the script, which he calls “fantastic,” adding that it “reads like a golden age Hong Kong heroic bloodshed movie. Cung has a great part written for him and he’s is absolutely, 100% the star of this film. I haven’t done an actual count but I’d guess he’s in well over 90% of the film. He gets to be a badass but he’ll also get the chance to show off what he can do as an actor. Lots of action from start to finish combined with some really strong character work.”

I’m sold. Simple as that. As much as I want to see Le back in the cage – he’ll rematch Scott Smith on June 26 – the 38-year-old probably doesn’t have too many more fights in him and there are worse ways to spend retirement than kicking the snot out of people on the big screen.