Reading other reviews of this, I noticed one common theme - love it or hate it, they all stopped discussing the plot after the first thirty minutes. So it's not me then: this is genuinely incomprehensible. You can just about hang on to things at the start, as Tyler (Nicholas Tse) gets involved with dodgy bodyguard agent Anthony Wong. Then the film leaps to Brazil for no readily apparent reason, except to introduce Jack (Wu Bai), a mercenary trying to escape his past, in the way people tend to in Hong Kong movies. And he has the usual lack of success: everything finally collides at Kowloon Station, in the last of a series of amazing set-pieces, all of which resemble a multi-player shoot-em-up like Counter Strike more than a proper action sequence. The visuals are stunning, and utterly pointless: we zoom into explosions, inside guns and down into tenement courtyards without any justification beyond it being way cool. Both heroes are singers lured into acting, and it's perhaps for the best; even Chow Yun-Fat himself would be hard pushed to make a character stand up in the face of this excess, so you might as well cut your losses and not let any acting interfere. This is the director's first HK film in several years; I think he's making up for lost time.
C
