the 2006 near-classic Hong Kong thriller
Dog Bite Dog certainly qualifies for this thread. Its an almost remake of First Blood, that first Rambo film wherein a group of law enforcement types continually find themselves vexed by a superior one person force, but change out the forest and smalltown setting for urban Hong Kong, and the Vietnam metaphor for third world poverty and add a shitload of grit. Its a beautifully shot film that makes squalid places look artful, its a well acted film starring a man who was demonstrably terrible to mediocre in every other film of his career, its more thematically loaded then almost any other action film you can name and doesn't for a second shortchange the thrills, it's a Hong Kong film that eschews their traditional style fights in favor of ones in which they are all short, fatal and ugly.
It also has the A.I. sort of perfectly bleak ending that's fully appropriate but the movie still has an unnecessary fourth act left in which to shit the bed, and shit the bed it does mightily, as it falls victim to the conventionality and sentimentalism that it so deftly avoided earlier. Dog Bite Dog should be a film that I would have recommended dozens of times over the last decade. Instead I recommend the immensely talented director who made it and recovered nicely, but who really, really, really lost control of his ship earlier on.
Trailer here, tons of spoilers within tho.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
