The film is set in China during the war with Japan. There's a map of an old gold mine at stake, and part of it is held by a local bandit. Several parties want that map, or else revenge on the bandit, so they all converge on an inn. These include a ranking Japanese official, who is also an expert profiler. The brother of a businessman killed by the bandit. A young woman named Yue, whose father and her lover were both killed by the bandit. And a goofy guy who is an expert in knockout drugs who wants revenge for his murdered boss. Even the innkeeper hates the bandit and wants revenge.
There's supposed to be a lot of mystery about the bandit. The movie heavily foreshadows that things aren't what they appear with him, or with anyone for that matter. But, as the movie is barely 80 minutes long, it doesn't do enough to build that tension. I'd put most of the blame on the film's focus on the knockout expert. Who they play as a semi-comic figure, with scenes of him trying to sneak around, or arguing with the innkeeper's mute brother, or tying a blade to a small bird that he can call later if he needs to free himself. For the amount of time he gets, it doesn't feel like there's much payoff, so that time ends up feeling like a waste of the relatively short run time of the film.
The film ends on a Mexican standoff that has everyone shooting everyone else a bunch of times, but it feels flat. It seems like at least one of the characters should have started shooting much sooner, and that they only held off so they could explain everything to us, rather than each other.
The movie had a solid, classic set-up, and it just didn't do anything with it.
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