Most of you will remember Danny Lee as Dumbo in The Killer. Here he is a few years later, a few years heavier, but with the same bad dress sense. He teams up with Michael Chow, who looks familiar to me but I don’t know where from – I suspect he usually plays the dorky mobile-phone slinging boyfriend type. I’m digressing.
In this hour-and-a-half long chase movie, Danny and Michael play two HK cops who get stung on a sting to the tune of five million HK taxpayers’ dollars. It was a cunning plan, whereby they offer an average street vermin a lot of money for drugs they don’t intend to buy, and stand ready to arrest him for the crime of selling them what they asked for. Go figure. He grabs the cash and gives them the slip, and their disgusted commissioner packs them off out of harm’s reach to Taiwan, where they accidentally pick up the dealer’s trail again. Showing that they’ve learned from experience, they up the ante by setting up a new fake deal worth 10 million dollars American, a figure which further inflates to 40 mill by the time the last bad guy has been perforated.
And bad guys there are in spades; this is one of those great crime films where the moment you’ve got a handle on who the head gangster is, the next bigger villain up the food chain steps in and blows the current villain’s brains out all over the nearest noodle counter.
Local Taiwan police commissioner Chan Chung-Yung (best known as the man of virtueous persuasion in Fong Sai Yuk) shares the HK commissioner’s exasperation with our bumbling duo. He and Danny say “Fuck you” to each other so many times that soon enough they’re firm friends and Chung-Yung’s breaking out the family snaps of his wife and kids, which is HK film-maker semaphore for “This guy is toast”. Meanwhile Michael goes undercover to set up the next big drug sting, and works hard to maintain his secret identity by freely indulging in cocaine, girls, and some disco dancing which displays all the suaveness of a marionette controlled by a puppeteer with Alzheimer’s.
It all comes out in a wash of lead, as you knew it would when you first saw the video cover. It’s no Killer, but stay with it, as it clips along and the characters do grow on you, and you’ll pick up lots of Cantonese swear words if you listen hard enough and practice in the mirror afterwards.