1999, Hong Kong. Starring Nicholas Tse, Stephen Fung, Sam Lee, Grace Yip, Eric Tsang, Daniel Wu, Toru Nakamura, Terence Yin, Francis Ng, Jaymee Ong, Moses Chan. Directed by Benny Chan. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

If you've read any of the reviews of Hong Kong movies we've posted in the past year or two, then you've no doubt picked up that we've been pretty down on the whole industry since round about the mid 1990s. I've gone into a great deal of detail as to exactly why the industry in Hong Kong collapsed after achieving such monumental heights, so I'm not going to reiterate here, especially since this review is an excellent way to stop writing about the recent failures of Hong Kong action cinema and shift instead to more optimistic writing about future success.

I think we're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The past few years have seen a number of fresh new faces finally emerging from the ashes, and it looks like things in Hong Kong are starting to finally get interesting again after we've endured years of cut-rate Wong Jing stinkers and wire-laden "kungfu" films that didn't seem to ever have any actual kungfu. Pieces are finally in place for Hong Kong to reclaim the action cinema throne it toppled off of (and subsequently left vacant since everyone else was sucking just as bad) sometime in the mid 1990s, and after years of hibernating in my little "golden age of kungfu" shell, I'm finally poking my head out and seeing what all this rumbling is about -- not to mention finally seeing the few good films from the latter half of the 1990s that I missed during my Hong Kong action film sabbatical.

Some of the people making folks stand up and take notice again are familiar faces who have finally paid their dues or are coming into their own, ready to shine now that the old guard is more or less retired or relocated. I'm thinking specifically here of guys like director Johnny To and stars Aaron Kwok, Jordan Chan, and Lau Ching-wan. Lau's already achieved a degree of fan and critical acclaim, and he seems to have all the right stuff to become the big dog in action cinema. He's got the look that is scruffy yet dignified, he's got emotional depth, and he's got a lot of great films under his belt. Jordan Chan, of all the new batch of Hong Kong young-bloods, is my favorite. He's engaging, and unlike Ekin Cheng, he can actually act. Aaron Kwok has been around for a long time now, and he's finally getting old enough to shake the "pretty boy" image that held him back throughout most of the 1990s. A few more years and a few more pounds, and he should be set to shine.

On the directorial front, guys like Johnny To, Benny Chan, Teddy Chan, Dante Lam, and Wilson Yip may not be the John Woo, Tsui Hark, or Sammo Hung of the new millennium, but then none of those guys got famous by being the next Chang Cheh or Liu Chia-liang either. They blazed new paths, took chances, and recreated the game with a new set of rules. After several years in the abyss, with people wallowing in the styles and retreaded visuals of the past, we finally have a new crop of directors who are once again challenging convention, shaking things up, and quite possibly lying the foundation for the next Hong Kong new wave. It's an uncertain but exciting time, and I feel myself finally getting back that sense of anticipation and excitement I had in the early 1980s when I watched Aces Go Places for the first time. After so long with nothing to get anxious over, Hong Kong is finally a place I want to start paying attention to again.

The real trick to revitalizing a movie industry is in finding new talent and new directions that appeal to both past and future fans. You have to find young actors who don't seem absurd in their roles (Ben Affleck as an ex FBI agent? Denise Richards as a brilliant nuclear physicist? Who the hell is casting people in Hollywood???) but still appeal to kids. And you have to find young actors who aren't so insipid and annoying that they turn away older viewers in droves.

Director Benny Chan (Who Am I, Big Bullet) seems to have hit the right combination of youth and tradition with Gen-X Cops. It's not that big of a surprise, I suppose. Benny Chan has already given us one of the most even and consistent Jackie Chan films in years (Who Am I), as well as 1996's Big Bullet, easily one of the best action films around and a real gem in the Hong Kong action film crown. Throw Jackie Chan and Eric Tsang in as the behind-the-scenes mentor and producer, and you have what should be a recipe for success.

Gen-X Cops begins on the right foot -- by bothering to explain why we will be seeing such brash youngsters in important investigative positions. Hollywood, of course, worships youth, but when they cast a 22-year-old as a veteran cop or something, they just expect you to roll with it and not question how the hell this kid got where he was. Gen-X Cops, however, shows us a little more consideration by providing a simple but adequate explanation for why everyone is so young: the criminals are young, too. Hong Kong street gangs. The new generation of criminals finally coming out of high school and into the big leagues. You can't infiltrate a violent youth gang with a fifty year old cop. They tend to stand out. Eric Tsang, as the pariah police inspector Chan, figures that to combat this new generation of criminals, you're going to need a new generation of cops.

The primarily stumbling block for Inspector Chan is that everyone thinks he is a moron because he had mental problems in the past and still has a pronounced nervous twitch when he gets upset. Rival inspector To (Moses Chan), who looks eerily like Nick Cave (as if there is an un-eerie way to look like Nick Cave), constantly berates Chan in front of the rest of the force, and no one seems all that interested in standing up for the little guy. When a gangland execution results in the death of an undercover cop, the police assign Chan to assemble "an elite unit" to take care of things, hoping that recruiting will keep him out of the way so Inspector To can work on the case without interruption.

Chan is determined to prove his worth, however, not to mention prove his intuition is correct when he thinks the younger brother (Daniel Wu as, umm, Daniel) of one of the murdered gangsters may be the very one who pulled the trigger, and may be the one who can lead them to big-time crime boss Akatora. Chan heads out to the police academy looking to recruit some fresh faces who will able to infiltrate Daniel's gang of obnoxious young killers. Unfortunately, everyone Chan sees is a total square, my favorite being the guy who tries out for the special unit by simply standing in the room and flexing his massive muscles. Things seem hopeless until Chan stumbles across three recruits who are in the process of being expelled for a variety of reasons, all of which boil down to "being uppity" and "exposing the idiocy of your elders." Needless to say, these three misfits are exactly what Chan has been looking for.

Nicholas Tse, Sam Lee, and Stephen Fung star as Jack, Alien, and Match respectively. All three are decent enough actors, though the roles they play here are about as thick as a page out of a comic book. Since this movie never aspires to be anything more than stupid fun, I can live with one-dimensional characters -- which describes just about everyone in this film with the possible exception of Inspector Chan, and that may only be because Eric Tsang is such a veteran at bringing life to absurd characters. Besides him you've got the three cops -- the goofball, the slick guy, and the moody guy. You've got the obnoxious police inspector who wears the same coat as those creepy bald guys from Dark City. You've got the honorable old gangster and the scumbag selfish young gangster. You've got the computer hacker girl and the sassy club girl with a British accent. No one is winning any awards for innovation, but as long as the movie keeps everyone moving around enough not to notice, that's fine by me. And the movie does achieve that very thing.

Jack, Alien, and Match are given new, hipper identities after indulging in a little gratuitous skydiving, which had to be done for two main reasons. First, you can't have a Gen-X movie without some extreme sport, and second, you have to establish that they know how to skydive so that can be used later in the film. They go undercover to follow Chan's hunch that Daniel is the trigger man behind the recent murders, and that he is in league with Japanese yakuza who is pulling the strings. Daniel is played by American-born Daniel Wu, who went to Hong Kong on a holiday after graduating from college and ended up making movies there. Just goes to show you kids -- if you put off real life and goof off a little more, you just might make it.

Wu is a decent enough actor, but like everyone else, he plays pretty much a one-note character. His job is to primarily walk around making "angry man" faces while wearing a jacket with no shirt on. You can always recognize a slick up and coming gangster by the fact that he'll be wearing a jacket with no shirt. Be glad those guys in The Sopranos don't do the same. Why is it that all those Hong Kong gangsters are always walking around in million dollar designer clothes, while Mafia guys walk around in cheap track suits? Well, I guess comfort is a big consideration for them. And who the hell is going to walk up to Paulie Walnuts and tell him he should dress a little hipper?

Match gets on Daniel's good side by hitting on his girl, Jayme, who it turns out was also Match's girlfriend back in Canada. That whole thing was pretty damn stupid and pointless, but whatever. As is usually the case, Daniel is going to kill our three heroes but is eventually impressed by their bickering and in-fighting, which is what we call "pluckiness" when we are being polite. He gives them a job -- go kill rival crime boss Lok, played wonderfully by Francis Ng. Of course, the job go haywire. For one, the boys realize that Lok is actually a pretty cool and honorable guy, and no one wants to kill him. When Daniel and his thugs show up, however, all hell breaks loose, and it gets even looser when some of Daniel's men defect and try to turn him over to Lok. Because duty calls for it, Match, Jack, and Alien end up rescuing Daniel instead of siding with Lok or the firestorm of cops who descend upon the place once all the shooting and exploding starts.

When one of the nameless, faceless cops is killed, Inspector To blames Chan and his band of misfits. Indeed, the entire police force seems indifferent-to-annoyed by Chan's inability to get the message that no one wants him actually working on the case. Chan has a breakdown and since they are not officially cops anymore, To succeeds in having Match, Jack, and Alien declared fugitives and suspected murderers. So now they got Japanese gangsters, Hong kong gangsters, and their own police force after them.

To make matters worse, Match and Jack get in an argument over Match's continued flirtiness with Jayme, causing Match, Jayme, and Alien to split ways with Daniel and Jack. It's all a ruse of course, so that Alien and Match can secretly back Jack up as he and Daniel meet with the dreaded Akatora. It culminates in a big display of exploding stuff and shooting at the quaint villa belonging to Akatora. The Gen-X cops discover that he's planning to blow up a convention center in order to kill some famous visiting Japanese politician who used to be a criminal and betrayed Akatora's dad. Convoluted? No doubt, but at this point you really can't care too much.

They attempt to stop Akatora from getting hold of the super-duper explosives he intends to use, which leads to a big fight in a mall where there happens to be a store in the very tall building that sells skydiving equipment. You figure out if this is where we learn the value of their skydiving skills. All things considered, it's far less groan-inducing than when that girl in Jurassic Park II had to use her amazing gymnastic skills as established earlier in the film to evade some raptors.

It all boils down to our lads and lass (computer hacker Y2K) facing off with Akatora in the bowels of the convention center while Inspector To's men run around and get shot. You know, one day I'm going to make a movie where the maverick cop fucks things up royally and the straight-laced, by the book partner ends up saving the day by sticking to regulations. Anyway, there is a cool part where Akatora taunts them with the detonator and says "If you can take this from me, you can stop the explosion." After a prolonged fight, the detonator gets dropped and everyone freaks out until Akatora says, "That's okay, I started it before I even told you you could stop me by taking it." That alone makes Akatora among the smarter criminals out there. Now if only he'd thought of just shooting his target instead of orchestrating a massively complex plan to blow up the entire building.

Will the young cops stop the crazy criminal? Will they manage to keep from getting shot by Inspector To and his men? Will they redeem the lost honor of Inspector Chan by proving him right? Will there be a big-ass fight and explosion at the end of the film? Well, what do you think?

In every sense of the phrase, this movie is "stupid fun," and it's easy to pick apart. There's an attempt to add an element of hipness to the events by mixing in English, but the English lines are so pitifully goofy and delivered with such awkwardness that they would have been much more effective had they simply not been used. It's really awful, and this is coming from someone who counts among his favorite film lines of all time the white guy from Once Upon a Time in China snarling "Who is this Wong Fei-hong? The Devil???" The story is needlessly roundabout.

What was the point of Match and Jayme having known each other in Canada? Just to explain why they fall in love so suddenly after he gives one of those "How could I take care of you when I couldn't even take care of myself?" speeches? It would have been more believable to just not worry about it and have them be two sexy young things who dig each other.

The film also spends all this time on Daniel's character only to have the actual villain be some other guy entirely. That's like writing a mystery novel where you get everyone to wonder "whodunit," then make the culprit someone who is only introduced in the final five pages -- or like making an entire slasher film then having the killer be someone's mom who isn't introduced until the final scene. It's cheap at worst, and in the case of Gen-X Cops, it's just pointless.

Need I even mention the disturbingly high number of "hold my gun sideways" moments there are. What the hell is with this? Who holds their gun like that? Some dumb-ass who has never fired a real weapon before and learned all his stuff from Mario Van Peebles, that's who! Still, I grit my teeth and just accept that for some bizarre reason, film makers continue to think this is cool. At least it's less ridiculous than the "cross my arms and shoot the guys on the left with my right hand, and vice versa." I guess if you are looking to be unable to aim your weapon and are hoping that it will jam up after squeezing off a few rounds, holding your gun sideways is a good thing.

With all that going wrong, and with the fact that the cast is basically the Hong Kong equivalent of a teenie bopper boy band (with Nick Cave lurking on the fringes scaring everyone), I fully expected to hate this movie. I was surprised when, not only did I not hate it, I actually had a lot of fun watching it. Dumb? You betcha. Style over substance? Completely superficial? Yesiree. Wouldn't argue with that. Sexy young cast? Sure, but at least the movie gave them a reason for being sexy and young instead of making us accept their youth at face value. With all those things wrong with the movie, it still managed to be thoroughly entertaining for a couple reasons.

For one, Benny Chan is a talented director, and he's an ace at finding the right pace for a movie and keeping things energetic even when nothing much is happening. he did it well in Who Am I, and he proved in Big Bullet that he has the skills to be a major force in the history of Hong Kong action cinema. He's got enough talent to elevate the film above the hackneyed, contrived, and completely predictable plot and turn it into something that is still exciting and energetic despite its massive number of short-comings.

The action is plentiful and is a decent mix of guns, explosions, hijinks, and fighting. No one is going to think these kungfu fights are going to revolutionize the industry, but they are fun and manage to compensate for the lack of real fighting skill in the cast without looking obvious.

The cast itself ranges from good to harmless. Moses Chan, Eric Tsang, and Francis Ng may all be playing one-note characters, but they still lend some sense of depth to them. It's no coincidence that these are also the most experienced actors in the film. Moses Chan as Inspector To is so thoroughly a complete and utter asshole that you can't help but like him. Eric Tsang manages to play slightly over the top without going to far, and Francis Ng is at his subtle best within the confines of his "honorable thief" character.

The young guys -- the cops, the girls, and Daniel Wu, are harmless. Sam Lee as Alien tends to be annoying, as all comic relief characters tend to be. Why is it that the comic relief guy is always the least funny of the bunch? But he's easy to discount since his character really does nothing other than stand to the side and shout in fear. Nick Tse and Stephen Fung are grade-A pretty boys -- the Aaron Kwoks of a new generation. I have not seen that many movies starring these two, but at least here they have the good sense to remain within whatever the limits of their skills may be by playing very familiar caricatures, which is not always a bad thing. It allows you to get to know an actor without immediately starting to hate them. Remember, we all though Keaneu Reeves was hilarious and talented until he tried to play characters outside his "Bill and Ted" range.

Daniel Wu is the most promising of the bunch. He's good looking and managed to bring a fair amount of intensity to his character. Granted, that probably wasn't that difficult but there's something to be said for knowing your role and shutting the hell up, as they say. I don't like any of these guys as much as slightly more seasoned young actors like Jordan Chan and Takeshi Kaneshiro, but none of these guys have been in the caliber of films that those two have been in. Gen-X Cops is, after all, no Fallen Angels or Downtown Torpedoes. But I also remember how much I hated Jordan Chan when all I'd seen him in were those annoying Young and Dangerous movies. I don't suspect I'll ever grow to like Sam Lee very much, though I can see myself referring to him as the "Jerry Lewis of Hong Kong youth" in the near future.

I don't think any of these guys will become the man around whom to rebuild the industry -- I think that's something I reserve for Lau Ching-wan and, to a lesser extend, Jordan Chan -- but you have all the makings for a decent bunch of b-team stars once they get a little older and a little better. Despite the pretty boy appeal that no doubt went into their casting, if you look hard enough, there is some actual talent on display. Granted most of it belongs to the director and the old guys, but Daniel Wu, Nick Tse, and Stephen Fung are still easier to watch than Ben Affleck. Maybe that's just because I don't have to hear about them all the time.

As far as the gals go, there's no denying that both Jayme Ong (as Match's girl) and Grace Yip (as computer hacker Y2K) are knock-outs. Grace Yip has a couple more films under her belt than Jayme (who I think makes her debut here), and it shows. Jayme's lines, all of which are in English, are often flat and awkward. I don't know how much of this is her lack of acting talent and now mush of it is simply the fact that the English language dialogue sounds like it was written by middle schoolers lacking a firm grasp of grammar and other finer points. Lucky for her the bulk of her lines are delivered during nightclub scenes where the blaring music obscures the fact that she's not a very good actress. Grace is much more engaging, but her character also has more to do than stand around being pretty.

And then there's the cranky fisherman who makes a cameo at the end of the film and dispenses some, "In my day, I was twice as lethal" wisdom. I'll just leave it at the fact that this guy has made cameo appearances before, but this is by far his funniest.

Gen-X Cops is the sort of movie you watch and are fully aware of the fact that it's completely ludicrous and not all that great, but at the same time it keeps you smiling and laughing. The action is decent, the cast operates within their boundaries, and the direction is great. Like I said, I went in fully expecting to hate this movie and pump out a scathing review about how much I hate snotty fashion-conscious kids these days -- and I do hate snotty, fashion-conscious kids there days -- but instead I found it was very easy to overlook the youth market "Gen-X" approach and just enjoy this as a brain dead but amusing action extravaganza.

Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Jackie Chan, Year: 1999