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Review
by Kozo: |
No
actual director is credited to this new entry in the
SDU series which began with Gordon Chan's The Final
Option. Titled The New Option, it stars
Michael Wong as Stone Wong, an SDU captain who's a
damn man at his job. This is probably not the same
Stone Wong from The Final Option, because that
Stone Wong was younger and is now dead. However, both
Stones are no-nonsense SDU trainers who must initiate
young studs into their SDU world. The latest young
stud: Shawn Yue of Just One Look and Infernal
Affairs.
Yue is Jackie Law, a member
of the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau. He first
meets Stone Wong when the SDU show up on a botched
raid led by he and partner Hon Kin (Raymond Wong Ho-Yin).
Despite the fact that the screw up makes him look
bad, Jackie enlists in the SDU as it's always been
his dream. He has SDU posters on his walls, and toy
SDU guns in his toy gunracks. He is also seemingly
more capable and intelligent than the average SDU
recruit, most of which are played by members of the
Hong Kong band EO2. Sadly, such individualism is frowned
up on in the SDU, which doesn't make him popular with
Stone (though his teammates seem to like him). Yu
also feels ostracized by his former OCTB teammates,
who think he's abandoning them. Meanwhile, Stone has
issues with his young recruits acting like tough guys,
and an evil bastard played by Patrick Tam begins planning
a daring theft.
The bread-and-butter
of the "Option" films is a decided attention
to minutiae. Past films have featured lots of procedure,
authentic-looking action and attitude, and much attention
paid to the characters' personal lives. The New
Option accomplishes some of that with a mundane
romantic subplot between Michael Wong and Suki Kwan
(as the OCTB's new chief), and obligatory moments
like introducing the various stock characters. On
the procedure side, there's some talk about the role
of the sniper (Jackie longs to be the team sniper),
and the revelation that the SDU pretty much does nothing
but train and wait 98% of the time. Maybe being in
the SDU means you're the "best of the best",
but it can be more boring than exciting.
The film could be seen
as boring than exciting too, but there are small positives.
Shawn Yue is a bland, but serviceable lead, and the
action (whatever little there is) is routine. Furthermore,
the presence of Michael Wong actually helps matters.
He's still an uninteresting actor, but his lightweight
presence has become such a fixture of these films
that it's practically welcome to see him. He still
mixes his English and Cantonese from beginning to
end, but at least none of his lines are as bad as
the classic one from First Option ("Rick
was a good man. Seduced by the dark side, he was.").
For awhile, The New Option looks like it could
be average stuff that's no better or worse than Andrew
Lau's 1996 flick Best of the Best.
Then it all goes straight
to hell. Jackie experiences a serious case of dementia,
which causes trouble at the office. We learn the secret
to Jackie's acute crimefighting skills, which is bumping
into the bad guys while wandering around town. Furthermore,
he becomes enamored of his buddy's girlfriend (new
singer Tiffany Lee) and begins leaving her creepy
phone messages. Meanwhile, Patrick Tam and his band
of bad guys start to bicker incessantly. Tam is supposed
to be one of those suave, dangerously intelligent
bad guys, but he looks like an idiot for surrounding
himself with such moronic comrades. And to top it
all off, all the bad guys employ the English/Cantonese
language which is usually the sole territory of Michael
Wong. By the time one of the bad guys begins calling
Stone out, you have to ask yourself: what the hell
is going on?
Well, no one person
took credit as the film's director, which could be
an indication of what went on. There's an executive
producer (Gordon Chan), a "presenter" (Wong
Jing), an executive director and two assistant directors.
It looks like the accountability has been spread out,
thus ensuring that no one person could be blamed for
this lazy Hong Kong movie. If you want a measure of
how poorly made this film is, look no further than
the film's length. The actual movie clocks in at just
above eighty minutes, whereupon the filmmakers pad
the film an extra five minutes by recapping the whole
thing in a music video montage! In film school, such
egregious technique would earn you bad marks and the
derision of your peers. The New Option pretty
much goes nowhere, and confirms what most of us probably
already know: it's a bad idea to make a movie in just
a week. (Kozo 2003) |
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