When circus performers travel into a left over army laboratory looking for gold they open the wrong canister and become exposed to toxic fumes that turn them into mutants with special abilities. Among them, merely by accident, is Sunny the hapless clown of the show who no one seems to like much, they even try to kill poor Sunny. Fortunately for him he managed to escape without getting the full on effects of the fumes. The others? Not so lucky.

As an American, when I see a superhero film I automatically assume that this is merely going to be the first of many and that this first one will be 50% boring because its all going to be introduction. The rule unfortunately applies in this case. We see Sunny’s miserable background as the circus clown hoping to one day have his shot but being denied the chance by his menacing fellow performers. We watch the accident in which Sunny receives his powers, his slow but inevitable transformation from mild mannered circus dork to, well, super hero dork (Sunny never seems to come into his own in the film in my opinion), and the moment where he decides to don the cape, in a manner of speaking. We really don’t see anything spectacular come out of the film for the first 50+ minutes. We wait and wait and wait and then finally, in what starts out as a fantastic fight with some cool special effects, we finally get to see Sunny do his thing, as poorly as he reveals it.

What follows once we’ve reached that pivotal turning point for any superhero is a disappointing Spider-Man 3 type goofiness. Once Sunny is the hero he goes straight Hollywood, and if you thought he was a dork before, oh man. Meanwhile the other circus performers have begun to mutate from just ordinary looking guys and gals to ghastly looking hunchbacks, lizard people, and punk rockers on steroids. Really the look of the bad guys is a bit over the top and hard to take seriously. Be that as it may we have our protagonist and his villains. When they see that Sunny hasn’t mutated into, well a freak of nature, they get a bit envious and want to know our heroes beauty secrets, but to get to Sunny they have to face off against two agents who are protecting Sunny; Old Man and Tia (I’m serious). Sadly Old Man and Tia could have made this movie fantastic if it was simply about them taking on mutants. Unfortunately it’s the Sunny show and these two kind of get kicked to the curb for most of the film, aside from some very excellent fight sequences, but their character depth is whittled down to a very clichéd back story that unfortunately has to move into the gray to progress Sunny to where he needs to be.

The film is jam packed with wire work. For those of you who missed the rise of films like Crouching Tiger, Iron Monkey, or Black Mask it’s a technique in which the actors are hoisted up with wires to give off the appearance that their able to fly to great heights or be thrown, kicked or punched likewise. I was sorely disappointed with the wire work in this film. It just looked ungraceful and goofy. When Sunny is knocked off the roof of a semi-truck his descent to the cars and streets below is just about as awkward as you can imagine. Matter of fact there are a lot of sequences where people are falling that simply scream WIRE!

Some of the effects are very cool looking but others not so much. In one scene Sunny throws, what I assume is a, tiny bamboo shoot through the air which does some damage to a bad guy. Much of the knife throwing sequences also had a realistic feel to them. As for make up effects. Well as our bad guys go more grotesque the sillier they look. The main bad guy played by Collin Chou (The Matrix Reloaded) goes from looking like himself, an average guy, to this muscle suit looking Buffy vampire that does nothing but distract. Terrible stuff that. It would have been better to just Ferrigno the guy and get him a muscle bound double. In any case the film loses a bit of credibility when we see the bad guys in full mutant form. In any case, I like some very strange films, as long as there is a good story and even better choreography, but City Under Siege feels more like a beginner’s film then one from a veteran film maker like Benny Chan.

QUALITY:
The main culprit in this release is grain. Black levels in a majority of the film go soft, being hazed over with grain which detracts from seeing the picture as a whole. Your eyes just get glued to it and you start to notice grain, if and when it is hiding out in brighter area’s where it’s not so easy to spot. Definition, sans grain, looks phenomenal. Old Man’s beard is very defined and, not to sound too cliché, if the mood hit you it would be pretty easy to count the individual hairs in it or count the pores in Shou’s face (before he gets it covered in that silly mask). Color is on again off again. Mind you this is a dark movie with a lot of purposefully muted color schemes. When color is present it’s actually pretty decent.

Audio is, as always, pretty fantastic (seeing as how this is Funimation). The only thing really missing from the audio is the back speaker soundscape. Up front you get crisp dialogue and ambient sound but when knives go a flying you get a nice cross sound from front to side speakers. There are many instances when the side speakers are incorporated and the overall sound schemes do not step over one another.

BONUS FEATURES:
~Trailers
~Making of: This isn’t too bad. For those Dub lovers you will be a little let down seeing as how it is only available in the films original soundtrack of Cantonese with English subtitles. The actors and staff talk about wearing the full body prosthetics in one of the hottest times of the year, operating under 12 hour days. Chan talks to us about Wire usage and how he wanted to incorporate it more and step away from the CG look of Hollywood films. There’s also a bit of Q&A going on. If you had super powers what would you do with them and what not? Definitely check this one out.
~Original Trailer
~DVD