Andy Lau in this film continued to play the role of Lee Rock, portraying his early rise in Hong Kong's police system under the colonial sovereign governing governing. Donnie Yen played a role as new comer and a new input of this Hong Kong generic and stereotyped underworld gangster who later associated himself and was manipulated by Lee Rock.
What I don't like too much of this film are the usual fatal flaws that almost every Chinese movie would always be unavoidable:
- Lousy screenplay with horrible dialog, making this film so painful to swallow.
- Bad acting that included Any Lau and Donnie Yen. The overly weight control
diet has deformed Lau into a skinny physical body with gaunt skeleton face,
resulted him as a non-outstanding ordinary little guy without any special
dominant aura to support his upper-echelon status in any job title, police or
gangster organization. Any GREAT or POWERFUL role he played only gave
me an impression that movie needed to make him being that role. There's
not enough believability to convince me he could be that great or powerful
person in that movie so far.
Donnie Yen is no exception in this movie with very bad acting with his
bloated facial condition. He was also deeply affected by the bad screenplay
to play a convincing enough character.
- Bad casting with many unnecessary clowns and jerks roles, such as Kent
Cheng, who played the sidekick and yes-man of Lee Rock. But in Chinese
movie industries, returning favors or special relationship always needed to be
considered from the cash-cow production groups behind the scene. So
manuscripts would always have to be revised, added more unnecessary roles,
thus unavoidably messed up the films. This trend and must-do is a tumor, an
appendix that Chinese movie industries could never cut off clearly.
- Poor make-ups with funny wigs that included Donnie Yen's cosmetic extra
eye-lid liner surgeries and moving Botox on his face.
- Status-quo no brainer trademark directing. Jing Wong has produced and
directed so many similar genre film like this one. He never improved or
evovled his directing technique and skill at all. Every film he directed or
produced was almost the same, no new ground was ever broken.
This film, in my opinion, is just another shallow farce with lot of back alley fights typically in Hong Kong gangster films. Donnie Yen has been trying very hard to make him not just a martial-art fighting machine in his films but an actor with more depth, but with only such lousy screenplays lying around, with his aging process, the only choice he could do is making money first with his fighting skills whenever big payloads throwing his way like Jackie Chan.
