LOS ANGELES, Aug. 20 (UPI) — Wings of Dread, screening Friday at the Big Bad Film Festival, opens the action festival with ferocious intensity. The Glendale, Calif., festival is a chance to see the film in a theater, but it is also streaming on the iQIYI service.

Air marshal Gu Chaoyang (Ashton Chen, who codirects with Qin Pengfei) boards a flight to reconcile with his estranged girlfriend, Dong Lu (Xia Ruoyan). When hijackers threaten the flight, Gu and the air marshal team must save the day.

There have been lots of action movies on planes, though Hollywood movies haven’t had kung Fu battles on planes. Wesley Snipes did martial arts, but the terrorists he fought in Passenger 57 did not.

Still, there are only so many areas of an aircraft in which to stage fights. So the rear flight attendant station and cargo hold are familiar settings, but it appears the filmmakers built this plane large enough for the camera to move around a lot.

The bathroom is still so tight it gives a female air marshal (Qu Jingjing) and hijacker (Hong Shuang) more leverage to maneuver their bodies, flip and invert against the walls.

The fuselage with the passenger seats may be the most limiting, but it doesn’t stop them from flailing around the aisles. A shot from midair through the windows is a clever way to portray that fight.

Changes in altitude do interrupt the fights, so it is different from fighting in stable gravity.

The Raid star Iko Uwais plays the mastermind hijacker and speaks mostly English in the film. He fights Gu in the cargo hold.

Speaking of language, the iQIYI version has English subtitles, but only for the dialogue. There is a lot of on-screen text and text messages that are unfortunately not translated, but it is still easy to follow the plot.

Chen and Qin even show outtakes during the end credits like a Jackie Chan movie. Here you get a sense of how fighting films are made, with visible wires and punches missing their opponents from a different angle. Even the plane breaks into sections for filming different angles.

Wings of Dread is a showcase for outstanding fighters and creative filmmakers. Confining them to an airplane forces more instinctive improvisation in the dynamic action.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.