After enduring years of cheesy but cool Asian martial arts action movies during the early ‘90s, I made the choice to take a break from the genre and step away. It wasn’t that Asian martial arts movies weren’t cool and entertaining, it was the fact that all of them started to feel the same due to a lack of production value. It was kind of like being spoiled by all the great Bruce Lee films as a kid and then having to endure a lifetime of Sonny Chiba flicks or Bruce Lee knock offs such as Bruce Li. Not that they weren’t cool in their own right, but I know some of you out there can relate. In the last half-decade, I’ve returned to the Asian martial arts genre with a vengeance simply because the overseas filmmaking market has finally caught up to Hollywood on so many levels. Infernal Affairs and House of Flying Daggers anyone?

Over the course of the last couple of years, Dragon Dynasty has released a slew of awesome Asian martial arts action titles with a level of quality fans won’t find anywhere else. From Kill Zone, Police Story, Seven Swords, The Protector, the Infernal Affairs Trilogy, Hard Boiled, Crime Story, and The Legend of the Black Scorpion, Asian action on DVD has never been better. The latest Dragon Dynasty release to come down the martial arts pike is Kill Zone director Wilson Yip’s Flash Point, which tells the tale of two Hong Kong cops, Detective Ma Jun (Donnie Yen) and Wilson (Louis Koo), and their efforts to infiltrate and bring down a ruthless Vietnamese gang headed by three drug smuggling brothers. While Wilson works the inside, Detective Ma puts the pieces together until both are pulled into the world of crime where the explosive story culminates in a relentless, no-holds-barred assault.

Here’s the deal... if you haven’t checked out the amazing Wushu martial arts acrobatics of Donnie Yen, you’ve been missing out on one of the best action stars of the last decade. I’m serious; the guy is absolutely riveting to watch. Yen proves that the days of Jackie Chan and Jet Li are long gone and a new generation of martial arts stars is here to stay. However, Donnie Yen is now in his forties, so we’re only going to see a few more years of kick-ass magic until age creeps up on him like a hidden and unstoppable force. Still, the unbelievable 16-minute showdown Donnie Yen has with Collin Chou in Flash Point is reason enough to add this DVD to your collection.

On the Two-Disc Ultimate Edition of Flash Point, fans get another jam-packed extra heavy release from Dragon Dynasty. Like the previous releases, master Hong Kong cinema expert, Bey Logan returns to school North Americans in the art of Asian action plus how Flash Point fits into the genre. Like Michael Okuda on the many Star Trek DVDs, Logan goes above and beyond to cover all of the bases surrounding details of the film, the actors, the fight sequences, choreography, underlying themes, and much more. As an incredible bonus on Disc 1, Donnie Yen teams up with Logan for one of the best commentaries I’ve heard in a while. Since Yen also served as both producer and action director on Flash Point, fans get one of the best well-rounded tracks of any Dragon Dynasty release to date. Like I mentioned, the final showdown is amazing and it’s even better when you revisit the sequence with Yen and Logan.

Disc 2 of the new Flash Point DVD delves even deeper into the production, covering many angles that include the story, shooting, the latest fight sequence technology in filmmaking, the science of perpetual motion as related to the film and fighting, the ultimate fighters, and footage of the sweet science and the popularity of Mixed Martial Arts. In addition, fans also receive a candid in-studio interview with Donnie Yen called "On Deadly Ground" where the star talks about re-teaming with Wilson Yip and the reasons for doing the film plus three deleted scenes, and a brief but close-up video look at the stars when they attended the Hong Kong premiere, which culminates with a fiery on-stage celebration.

Simply put, the Flash Point: Two-Disc Ultimate Edition DVD is one of the top Dragon Dynasty releases to come down the pike from the joint partnership between The Weinstein Company and Genius Products. If you love Asian cinema and Hong Kong action, do yourself a favor and pick this up. It’ll make you forget about a lot of other sub-par North American action films of recent years.