Rating: D+
Dir: Stephen Fung
Star: Andy Lau, Jean Reno, Shu Qi, Jingchu Zhang
Well, this is disappointing. In Lau, you’ve got one of Hong Kong’s top stars (Infernal Affairs), with a career going back decades. Reno hardly needs any introduction. So why is the end result here so… blah? Honourable thief Dan Cheung (Lau) comes out of jail and immediately begins working on One Last Heist™. This is stealing a priceless piece of jewellery called GAIA, which is currently separated into three component parts, and to this end, he recruits Red Ye (Shu) and Po Chen. But hot on their trail is Detective Pierre Bissette (Reno), who finds Cheung’s disgruntled ex-fiancée, Amber Li (Zhang), and convinces her to help capture the criminal.
It feels like it could almost be a live-action adaptation of a Lupin the 3rd story. Turns out it’s either a remake of, or heavily inspired by, John Woo’s Once a Thief, which starred Chow Yun-Fat. It wasn’t Woo’s best, and offered room for improvement. This isn’t it, however. Instead it is all polished to within an inch of its glossy life, on a budget of $20 million, which is not cheap by Chinese standards. It clocks up the air miles too, whizzing around France for a bit, before relocating to the Czech Republic. Where, for some reason, Detective Bissette is still allowed to operate. Indeed, I’m not quite sure who he works for, or why he doesn’t appear to abide by any standard police procedures. There’s 45 seconds of the mildest talking-to from his boss and former partner, and that’s about it for oversight.
Will say, in Bouzov Castle the makers have found a very nice location, and they take full advantage of it. It’s there the final part of GAIA is located, owned by wine billionaire Charlie Law, and kept in a vault secured by a slew of state-of-the-art security systems. Which, naturally, Cheung is able to breeze through with the minimum of effort. Not that it matters, since inevitably, there’s a double-cross in the works, ending in cop and thief having to work together to defeat the real villain. Except, they don’t really work together. Lau and Reno only share a couple of scenes, and they’re nowhere near as good as I wanted them to be.
All of this would be tolerable, if the action was at a level commensurate with a big (relatively speaking) budget Chinese production. It isn’t, being almost lazily generic, like you’d see in a straight to video Hollywood film. I get that Andy Lau might be too old for this shit, but that’s why you bring younger actors on board. There’s only one sequence of note, and even it feels borrowed. It sees Cheung descending on a wire into a vault guarded by lasers, while Po battles a guard in the security control room, for control of the lasers. Otherwise, if China was attempting to prove they could make movies every bit as bland and uninteresting as Marvel or DC, consider that Mission: Possible.