Oof. Okay, I love Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy
Lau, but this is not a good movie,
not even a little. Super cheesy, crude
humor, and a meandering storyline that takes forever to go anywhere.
In
prepation for taking out a big triad boss, a number of recruits are
cherry-picked for “Special Squad” and brought together for intense
training. However, most of the recruits
are as incompetent as they are impulsive, which doesn’t seem like a great
recipe for success. In between raising
their commander’s blood pressure, they somehow gain the expertise they need to
complete their mission.
Okay,
here’s what I don’t get. We follow the
commander going around to different places picking out recruits, and he seems
to go out of his way to pick cocky guys with attitudes about authority who
don’t take anything seriously. If the
goal of Special Squad is to whip sorry recruits into shape, that’s be perfect,
but it’s not. It’s supposed to be
selecting the best for an elite, highly-dangerous mission, and interspersed
scenes of the triad boss show what a big bad he is. So why on earth does the commander assemble
all these goofballs together, guys who are going to need to improve massively
to even be a ragtag bunch?
That’s
the incredibly-slender premise the plot, what little there is of it, hangs
on. The film seems unconcerned about
that, though, as the story is mainly a vehicle for the jokes. They are many, they are varied, they are
rapidfire, and for the most part, they are not good. I’ll admit that some of the sight gags earned
a smile from me, but most of the time is spent on our knucklehead heroes
clowning around during training with tons of corniness and little in the way of
the actual humor.
The
acting throughout is needlessly broad, and that goes for Leung as well. He plays Eng Di An, one of the chief squad
clowns. He and Andy Lau’s character
pratfall and wisecrack their way through training, mugging and pulling faces
with abandon. While Leung often plays
the self-assured, smartass ideas man in his early comedies, he’s a bit more of
a sidekick here, with Lau taking the lead.
Together, there’s no task or drill they won’t try to weasel out of.
I can
tell Leung isn’t good in this movie,
but I’m not exactly sure how far he veers into bad; the copy I found was dubbed
into Mandarin, so another actor was giving the vocal performance. Whether Leung’s original Cantonese is as
hammy as this guy’s Mandarin, I don’t know.
Still, just going on his physical performance, this is no prize.
Recommend?
In
General
– Nope. Too dumb, and at an hour and
forty minutes, it still feels interminable.
Tony
Leung Chiu-wai
– For completists only – this isn’t a role to scour for.
Warnings
Violence,
sexual content (including prostitution,) drinking/smoking, crude humor,
swearing, and thematic elements.
No comments:
Post a Comment