“The Scavenger” Poster
If you’ve caught Liu Fengchao as a superkicker villain in recent action films like Black Storm and Wings of Dread on the Chinese streaming service iQIYI, chances are you’d be eager to see the award-winning Wushu athlete receive his own starring vehicle. Well, we’ve got a bit of a Monkey’s Paw situation here, because 2026 brings the release of an action-packed modern day thriller in which Liu Fengchao’s martial arts skills are front and center…but I’m also forced to ask director Qin Pengfei: did this have to be a scuzzy drama about sexual exploitation in the music industry too? Despite featuring two or three of the best fight scenes I’ve seen all year, including a parking garage scrap worthy of a South Korean gangster flick, The Scavenger is often so damn unpleasant outside of the moments when Fengchao is throwing punches that I’m a bit hesitant to give it an outright recommendation.
No doubt Qin Pengfei is one of the best action directors working today, but his films do often lean on themes of human trafficking and sexual coercion as a shorthand to quickly establish the kind of bad guys that you instantly loathe. At this point, such themes are almost par for the course when you’re watching an Asian action flick, with The Furious being another recent example, but I’d argue The Scavenger takes things into seedier territory than we typically see for this kind of picture. For instance, there’s a wholly unnecessary subplot about one of the main bad guy’s slimy underlings who collects sexual blackmail on his boss, in part so he can get off to it in his little Continue reading
4 Comments