A Little TLC(w): Come Fly the Dragon (1992)

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.