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Review
by Kozo: |
Handsome
Alex Fong goes ultra-intense in the surprisingly decent
cop thriller Explosive City. When a government
officer (Joe Cheung) visits Hong Kong, he gets targeted
for assassination by Jade (Hisako Shirata), a mysterious
female killer who subsequently gets into an accident
and loses her memory. The officer in charge, Cheung
(Simon Yam), assigns CID Yiu Tin-Ming (Alex Fong)
to investigate her case, but before he can even start,
it's already too late. Ming's wife and child get taken
hostage, and he's forced on the run with the still
amnesiac Jade. Meanwhile, the nefarious Japanese bad
guy (Sonny Chiba) makes his presence known by speaking
in a guttural tone, quoting Sun Tzu's "Art of
War", and wearing a newsboy cap like it's required
gangster chic. Ming must unearth Jade's memories to
discover her connection to the baddies, lest further
lives be lost and the movie stretch to two hours.
All this plus many shots of Simon Yam brooding.
At first glance, Explosive
City looks to be cheap, crappy action stuff not
unlike director Sam Leung's previous Color of Pain.
However, instead of that film's questionable leading
duo of Raymond Wong Ho-Yin and Kenya Sawada, we get
Simon Yam and Alex Fong. If the implication isn't
there, then here it is literally: Simon Yam and Alex
Fong are much better actors than either Raymond Wong
or Kenya Sawada, and both take this typical genre
plot and make it much more watchable. Though Fong
threatens to overact, he manages to play a convincingly
harried cop whose disintegrating emotions prove compelling.
Simon Yam is all calm, grizzled cool, and Hisako Shirata
makes a competent femme fatale/amnesiac heroine.
The rest of the cast ranges
from effective (Sonny Chiba overacts, but what else
is new?) to just plain bad (the bit players stink
like mad). Plus, the inconsistent language only distracts.
It's annoying when characters speak different languages
while supposedly talking to one other. Why is it that
Japanese-born Jade speaks Cantonese when talking to
Ming, while everyone else speaks other languages to
Sonny Chiba, and he only responds in Japanese? If
one were to look at it logically, the implication
could be everyone knows multiple languages, but nobody
will meet anyone else halfway. However, there's no
narrative decision presented, making the language
mismatch distracting. There's simply no reason anymore
for this sort of illogical storytelling; if the actor
can't speak the language, dub them. Also, the majority
of the actors who interact with Sonny Chiba are awful,
so having them speak their own language is doubly
annoying. Director Sam Leung drops the ball there.
Still, that's probably
the largest ball Leung drops. On the plus side, Leung
brings decent pacing, a believably tough tone, and
emotions that are less gooey or cheesy than they could
have been. He does overdose on gritty handheld camerawork,
so those who have problems with motion sickness had
better get their Dramamine ready. Also, the climactic
final sequence crosscuts between multiple locations,
all of which are apparently accessible via teleportation
or some other form of fictional high-speed transportation.
Ming and Jade manage to zip around Macau at a moment's
notice, which is really convenient when lots of bad
things are happening at once. But in the end, it's
all good, or at least tolerable. While rife with unoriginal
plotting and questionable dialogue (at one point,
9/11 is uncomfortably invoked), this is decent B-grade
stuff with solid action sequences and an appreciable
no-nonsense attitude. Explosive City isn't
witty, stylish, or even that interesting, but it's
engaging enough for what it is. And it's a hell of
a lot better than Color of Pain. (Kozom 2004)
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