Rating: *
Review Date: 2/26/11
Action Director: Carter Wong
Cast: Carter Wong, Michelle Ko, Pauline Chan, Jollin Tzen, Sharon Kwok
Ugh. Another awful Hong Kong action film with a nonsensical title. A stiff and wooden Carter Wong is a tough police officer who is trying to crack a drug smuggling operation. His partner is a very pretty Michelle Ko, but he suspects that her uncle is a drug lord, so he decides to hook up with Pauline Chan for the remainder of the case. Everything finally comes together at the end with a laughably excessive assault on a small island by a massive number of Chinese cops. It actually looks like footage of military training maneuvers interspersed with actors and stuntmen.
First of all, the film is a mess and jumps all over the place with no sense of direction or continuity. The standard English dubbing is as bad as you would expect, except for Michelle Ko's voice actress. She is actually quite good and stands high above the rest. Carter Wong's fight choreography is as stiff and awkward as his acting, and is rather disappointing. Beauty queen Pauline Chan has little more than an extended cameo, which makes me wonder why she's in the film at all. She's very weak as an action actress, and is heavily doubled in all of her fight scenes. She also wears no makeup and is in sweat pants the entire time, so she doesn't even offer any eye candy. The real beauty in the film is Inspector Li Chu (Jollin Tzen?), a Chinese police officer with the physique of a runway model. Her kung fu is pretty weak, but her delivery is confident and her form has the grace of a dancer.
One of the more ridiculous scenes is a prostitution ring where the punishment for trying to run away is having a bowl of mealworms poured on you. Yum. Another hilarious throwaway side plot is when Wong asks Ko if she's found her long lost sister yet. She's been looking for years without success, and then in the very next scene she learns that her sister is married to one of her coworkers on the police force. How convenient. And odd. And completely irrelevant. The film inexplicably ends with an explosion after the bad guys have been arrested and hauled away. Did they have some leftover gasoline at the end of the movie that they needed to use? I guess that makes as much sense as the rest of the film.