Reviews

Pure exploitative vindication

Pure exploitative vindication. Possibly one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever had the displeasure of viewing, Bruceploitation was already a subgenre I had a huge discomfort with, but Bruce Lee and I has taken that to a whole different level. An intimate portrait of Betty Ting Pei's illicit love affair with Bruce Lee, told from the perspective of the world's neediest sympathy sponge, it's a downright sickening production. Cheap at every turn, it's a sleazy mix of gossip, melodrama and outright fabrication; every scene is designed to exploit Lee's fame rather than celebrate what made him such a magnetic screen presence in the first place. It's only really worth a vague glance to see Danny Lee as Bruce Lee; other than that, we'd be better off burning every available copy. I feel no sympathy for Betty.

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Old-school wuxia comedy with a glossy post-handover makeover

An old-school wuxia comedy with a glossy post-handover makeover, The Duel bounces between political conspiracies, mistaken identities, romance, comedy and increasingly absurd action sequences with enough CGI and star power to light up Victoria Harbour. It's less like a straight martial arts film than a variety show built around the promise of a sword fight that never comes. It's very much a hybrid effort, and the comedy is ill at ease with the heavy drama that occurs later on, but credit to Director Andrew Lau because, for the most part, the film is utterly gorgeous with plenty of soft colour and wonderful scale. The uneven silliness and fluid fight choreography are ultimately a victim of the incomprehensible editing, and unfortunately, it all kind of falls apart when paired with the comedic writings of Wong Jing and the hyper robotic leading performance from Nick Cheung, looking fairly ridiculous with dreadlocks and a pencil moustache. He lacks a well-defined comic persona, coming across as more annoying than entertaining, but here his presence is strangely welcome as it looks like he is at least enjoying lampooning the straight-faced drama. Andy Lau is always a welcome presence, and I kinda love Vicki Zhao, but, for the most part, The Duel is a rather middling but glossy affair. Messy, overstuffed, but reminiscent of other early nineties wuxia comedies.

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Fear, hope and disillusionment

A sequel from an entirely different genre and taking the gritty bleakness of the series into overdrive, Long Arm of the Law IV is cut from a completely different cloth, abandoning the robbery-centred plots of earlier instalments and instead acting as a highly incendiary response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. There's a reason this hasn't seen a re-release since its VCD, one I ultimately imagine is down to a narrative based on Operation Yellowbird, the extremely bold use of footage of the Tiananmen Square protests, and it's far from subtle recreations of the events with a horrifically high body count to boot. Rather than thriving on momentum and carefully orchestrated chaos, Director Michael Mak instead goes for restless, messy but ultimately ambitious storytelling, and I respect him for that. It's an exceptionally bold piece of filmmaking, even if it feels as if they've had to make a compromise to avoid the Category III rating. There's a genuine sense of displacement and uncertainty, portraying characters caught between political realities and the false promise of escape. Hong Kong is no longer the glamorous refuge it might appear to be from across the border; it's another hostile landscape where survival comes at a cost. The action scenes are effective, though they're not the main attraction. What lingers is the atmosphere, the paranoia, the exhaustion and the sense that every character is running toward a future that may not exist. Bolstered by some outstanding performances and Joseph Chan's incredible music, Long Arm of the Law IV remains a highly compelling action thriller, not because it delivers bigger action or higher stakes than its predecessors, but because it captures fear, hope and disillusionment with a brutal honesty, ending the saga on a deeply pessimistic note.

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Commercial action spectacle over gritty realism

The first two Long Arm of the Law films built their reputation on grit and desperation, with their criminals trapped by circumstance. Long Arm of the Law III takes a drastically different route. It's bigger, louder and far more of a star vehicle that certainly plays to Andy Lau's strengths as both a charismatic hero and romantic leading man. Although it loses the vicious edge, it remains a strong piece of engaging melodrama where one moment it’s a tragic romance about displaced migrants chasing a better future; the next it’s a brutal crime thriller packed with betrayals, gunfights and ruthless gangsters. It sits in a sort of unhappy middle ground where it’s too romanticised to be a full-blown neo-noir, not quite a heroic bloodshed and too glossy to be a hard-edged crime thriller. However, returning director Michael Mak still delivers plenty of grit and determination; his action sequences are excellent, with a climactic stretch, in particular, offering a barrage of bullets, double-crosses, and body counts that feel determined to top everything that came before it with a heist final heist that feels straight out of the Michael Mann playbook. The trade-off is that some of the social realism and bleakness of the earlier films gets diluted with the script occasionally relying on coincidence, broad villainy and emotional manipulation. Yet there's something undeniably entertaining about the film’s emotional excesses, an energetic slice of Hong Kong cinema in its heroic-bloodshed prime. Lau's charisma undoubtedly helps sell the film, but equally is his wonderfully goofy relationship with Elizabeth Lee. The rest of the performances are all pretty great, with highlights from Elvis Tsui, Kirk Wong, Max Mok and a pre-Liu Kang Robin Shou. Although it very much feels like the point where the series fully embraced commercial action spectacle over gritty realism, Long Arm of the Law III is a wonderfully messy and violent slice of fun.

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Fighting fire with fire

Fighting fire with fire, although it never quite escapes the shadow of the original, Long Arm of the Law II is a slicker but no less brutal follow-up that's just as tense, cynical and morally corrosive. It's dog-eat-dog, where violence is simply a routine fact of survival, self-preservation takes precedence when you're in over your head, stuck in increasingly dangerous limbo, where neither fully criminals nor fully accepted by the authorities they serve. It all feels like a decidedly glossier affair, losing the raw unpredictability but retaining the dirty, pessimistic attitudes; it feels lived-in and authentic, aided by some wonderful location shooting and a visual style that often resembles reportage more than conventional genre filmmaking, but with Michael Mak taking over directing duties, it doesn't stop the film from being almost as breathtaking as its predecessor. Shootouts are messy, brutal affairs; panic and desperation are the de facto settings when everything goes wrong. Yes, it does occasionally rely on overly familiar undercover-cop conventions, with the storyline getting a little muddled in the middle due to a surfeit of subplots, but the film delivers absolutely thrilling firepower amid all its barbarity, even stopping for a karaoke number. The cast, led by Alex Man, Elvis Tsui and Ben Lam, gives the film much of its emotional weight, teaching us the ultimate lesson when it comes to being an undercover cop: it sucks, it contributes wonderfully to the film's sense of realism and desperation. Their characters, fish out of water introduced into a capitalist society, this time with a touch more levity, are not idealised heroes but trapped men trying to navigate systems that view them as expendable. Complimented by the usual Hong Kong lax standards when it comes to stunt safety and a fantastic musical score, Long Arm of the Law II is a gritty, unsentimental and relentlessly tense concoction of bombastic firepower and fallout that's certainly not for the fainthearted.

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Brutally visceral

Brutally visceral from beginning to bloody end, Long Arm of the Law speaks volumes about its people and society, exploring how Mainland Chinese in the Bamboo Curtain era desperately desired better opportunities in the colonial-ruled Hong Kong, even if it came at the cost of losing their lives. Everyone has their own personal issues to work through, but this isn't a feel-good, fuzzy film about redemption and ultimate reconciliation. The characters are stymied or even undone by their disassociation with Hong Kong; their success and/or failure hinges on who they are. In the end, they don't affect the situation; it affects them. Every decision pushes the gang deeper into danger, and every attempt to regain control only accelerates their downfall. They are not glamorous antiheroes, but poor, opportunistic men chasing a fantasy of quick wealth, observed with a mixture of sympathy and brutal honesty. Arriving just shy of the heroic bloodshed boom that would soon dominate the landscape, many of the genre's defining traits are already here: desperate criminals, fractured loyalties, explosive violence and a city that seems determined to grind everyone down. Seriously, how on earth has Johnny Mak only ever directed this?! He paints Hong Kong not as a neon playground but as a crowded, chaotic landscape filled with cramped apartments, back alleys, cheap hotels and criminal middlemen. Favouring confusion, panic, and sudden eruptions of violence where gunfights are messy and frightening, while chases feel improvised and desperate. It's utterly mesmerising. Above all, the casting is the major key; from top to bottom, the actors are mainly amateurs, but their performances are starkly real, no doubt helped by the improvisational attitude to some scenes that lend them all a beautiful authenticity. There are no heroes here. There's only a society that loses. A tense, cynical, and deeply atmospheric portrait of men chasing a dream that was doomed from the start, few films feel as raw, influential, or unsettling as Long Arm of the Law.

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Back to the Basic of Korean Romance but... nothing else.

This movie starts from your stereotypical high schooler, someone who has a crush on a classmate but needs to improve herself to ask them out. The most basic cliche but honestly, nothing went wrong in the displayal, was a cute plot of a new student coming in and trying to help out the girl to ask the guy out. The biggest praise I do have for this is for the female lead to have realized the importance of the friend and her actual feelings towards him before she went through with her scheme, so we didn't have to go through the trouble and embarassement of the second lead pretending to be the first lead. I still don't understand the need for the ending plot, for a movie, no need to have a problem that solves without any explaination.

Overall, a pretty standard high school romance novel, not as good as other ones, but nothing terrible.

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Okay Watch

I'm usually a sucker for these kinds of movies. It has the underdogs, the action and the bromance. However, none of those really hit that much, all aspects of it kind of feel "meh". The movie tried to present a lot of different characters, but none of them were developed, so no one felt "real". Which then made it impossible to connect to them. It comes to the point that I didn't care what would happen to anyone. The action scenes were literally all the same, he gets beat up over and over again, then gets up and suddenly takes over the fight. Throughout, I kept waiting for the moment the movie will hook me, only for the end to come.

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A little too "real" for me (real downer)

My Rating

7.5/10

Review

This is an offering in the friends-to-lovers category, which is usually one of my favorite romance tropes. I like happy endings. That's just me. Some people prefer stories that are more dramatic and feel more "real." If that's what you enjoy, you may like this movie a lot more than I did.

The film hits all the high points of a strong romantic drama. The characters are well developed, the story is compelling, and the relationship feels authentic. I was invested in both Han Jeong-won and Lee Eun-ho from the beginning. Their friendship was easily my favorite part of the movie. They were great friends, and I had very high hopes for them as a couple.

Visually, I loved the choice to have the present-day scenes in black and white while the past was shown in color. It was a beautiful way to reinforce the idea that Jeong-won brought color and life into Eun-ho's world. It was also pretty obvious that she was the inspiration for Jane in his video game.

Unfortunately, I found the overall experience sad rather than romantic. Once Lee Eun-ho and Han Jeong-won became a couple, Eun-ho became increasingly moody, and it didn't always feel consistent with the character we had come to know earlier in the story. By the end, I didn't feel like the movie delivered a satisfying payoff for everything the audience went through with them.

I wouldn't watch it again, and I would only recommend it to viewers who enjoy emotional dramas and realistic endings rather than happy ones.

Spoilers

I really loved the friendship between Han Jeong-won and Lee Eun-ho. Their chemistry as friends was fantastic, and I was rooting for them the entire time.

I found it heartbreaking when they broke up. It was also sad that Jeong-won seemingly did not maintain a relationship with Eun-ho's father after the separation. Their shared struggles and eventual successes made me want to see them enjoy the rewards of all that hard work together.

One thing that left me confused was the ending. Eun-ho appears to have a son, which made me assume he eventually married, but the film never really confirms what happened. It leaves a lot to the audience's imagination.

I was also unsure about the pregnancy storyline. At one point, it looked like Jeong-won was looking at an ultrasound, but the movie never seemed to fully address what happened afterward.

As someone who is highly empathetic, this movie was honestly a terrible choice for me emotionally. It completely dragged me down. Their ending felt incredibly sad. Yes, they reunited, but then they went their separate ways again. The film presents them as the great love of each other's lives, and I've seen plenty of real-life couples work through challenges like theirs and come out stronger on the other side.

To me, it felt like they gave up on each other.

My interpretation is that Eun-ho let Jeong-won go because he believed he was holding her back. I understand that reasoning, but I kept waiting for the story to bring them back together later. After taking the audience through all of that heartbreak, the fact that they aren't even friends by the end felt pointless and depressing.

The movie clearly wanted to make a statement about timing, dreams, and how love isn't always enough. It succeeded. I just didn't enjoy where that message left the characters.

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Ghost Illusion

The most interesting thing about this movie is the folklore behind it — the real-life stories that inspired the creators. Salmokji is a real place where many strange occurrences have been reported, so of course a movie was made to exploit it. I can say that for the first half, I was intrigued to see where it was all going, but in the second half, I just stopped caring about the characters. The mystery remains a mystery, and it’s hard to definitively conclude what really happened.

The movie is full of cheap jump scares. They build tension in a scary scene, then a ghost suddenly appears, the movie immediately cuts to the next scene, and the ghost is gone. It feels like the producers used every opportunity to insert a scare without thinking about the consequences or consistency. For example, there’s a scene with a character on a boat who changes appearance to another person and finally he disappears and the movie just continues as if nothing happened.

What I did like was the camera work. They experiment with different perspectives and shots, showing some nice filming diversity in a few interesting moments. But in the end, this is just a forgettable movie that had potential but wasted it on cheap horror tropes.

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