User reviews

Technically Lôi Báo is Vietnam movie industry second attempt at the superhero genre after the horrendous that is Super X in 2015 and I give big credit to the director Victor Vu for his bravery cause despite all the flaws I'm about to list Loi Bao is a proper superhero movie when it nails all basic aspects of the genre.An ill fated comic book artist "Tam" got a major life change after a head transplant surgery by Uncle "Ma" a friend of his family turn him into what he always wanted a superhero while people who know the true identity of his new found body start to show up and put his life and his family on the verge of danger. What I hate the most about Loi Bao is not the wooden acting from the characters or the mellow drama that make me chuckle more than sad cause those are unavoidable elements when it come to not Vietnam but Asian cinema in general but the so called "Superpower" of Lôi Báo .I know that hand to hand combat and parkour can be achieved through hard work but the movie don't even bother to explain why sometime he can do incredible stuff like lifting way too heavy objects and dodging bullets when his new body still belong to a normal human being.The ending set up for a sequel that I'm totally down for cause a superhero need a supervillain if only they got a better script next time

Right, well I figured that a Vietnamese action movie with superhero elements might be a good way to spend 113 minutes. And thus I opted to sit down and watch "Lôi Báo" here in 2023, without ever having heard about it actually. I stumbled upon it, and the synopsis seemed interesting enough, plus the fact that it was an Asian movie that I hadn't already seen was sufficient to make me give the movie a chance.

And I managed to endure a mind-numbing 77 minutes of this heap of rubbish from writers Doan Nhat Nam, Kay Nguyen and Victor Vu before I gave up. Wow, talk about a bland script and even worse characters. The narrative in the movie was slow paced, and the fact that the writers tried to spruce it up with some body switching just didn't help, because there was no drive behind the movie. Everything that transpired on the screen was just monotonous and bland.

Of course, with my limited exposure to Vietnamese cinema, then I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble here. But they were struggling, oh boy were they struggling. They had nothing wholesome to work with in terms of script and characters. Especially the characters, they were so flat and one-dimensional that I simply didn't care one bit about any of them.

There were a couple of fair enough fight scenes and some action scenes in the 77 minutes that I endured, but it just simply wasn't enough to sustain the movie. And I have to say that I am not a fan of Parkour, which was done in an abundance in this movie.

"Lôi Báo" is a movie that came and went without leaving even the slightest of ripples on the pond. The movie will be shelved here, and I will never return to attempt watching the rest of the 113 minutes. And this is hardly a movie that I would recommend to fans of the Asian action cinema.

My rating of director Victor Vu's 2017 action movie "Lôi Báo" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.