Rating: B-
Dir: Wilson Yip
Star: Leon Lai, Jordan Chan, Qi Shu, Sam Lee
Yip’s movie wants so badly to be Mission: Impossible it hurts, piling high-tech gadgetry on top of a comic-book caper plot, name-checking the M:I films with reckless abandon. The director of Bio-Zombie and Mongkok Story goes for the gusto casting Wicked City’s Lai as Mac, a heroic cracksman with a hurtful secret in his past setting out to tackle a noble challenge. A new cancer drug (the gleefully named SPAT) has been co-opted by the no-good partner of its creator and Mac’s oddball team of thieves must get it back. Bird (Big Bullet‘s Jordan Chan), June (Qi Shu of Extreme Crisis) and Sam (Sam Lee of Beast Cops) pool their skills and gizmos to bust into the drug lab, which features a cool zero-gravity chamber, physics be damned.
But no sooner has Mac reached the SPAT than everything goes wrong and he barely escapes, with only a brief encounter with the mysterious Michelle to haunt him; soon the pain of his old loss comes crashing back as the team realise they are being played for patsies and the hunt for the real crooks is on. If you can’t track the back-engineering of this script to the original M:I movie you’re just not trying, but don’t let that halt your enjoyment of it. Although the action goes a little off the rails towards the final act, Lai holds the screen well while Chan, Shu and Lee provide passable comic relief; this is a no-brainer with some heart.