1997, Hong Kong. Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jordan Chan, Charlie Yeung, Theresa Lee, Ken Wong, Alex Fong. Directed by Teddy Chan. Available on DVD (HKFlix).

I suppose the big stumbling block on my way to becoming an ultra-cool international spy and man of mystery is that I'm not very cool. I may be "ultra" many things, but cool would not be among them. That and the fact that I don't have millions upon millions of dollars at my disposal and I have never met, let alone romanced a baroness. Hell, I don't even know how you get to be a baroness. Oh sure, you marry a baron, but what the hell? What do these guys do? I mean, the Red Baron was a World War One flying ace and famed pizza chef, but I think today's generation of barons spend less time in biplane dogfights over No Man's Land than they did back in 1915. I guess barons and baronesses these days just while away the hours speeding around Monaco in wee little convertible sports cars.

Still, I've always dreamed of that daring life, though I've also dreamed of being a fireman, an astronaut, and a guy with the power to decide who lives and who dies. If I can't be a spy, then I'll do the next best thing, which is sit around in my underwear eating Bagel Bites and watching spy movies.

It's probably no shock to anyone that I consider the spy films of the 1960s to be vastly superior to the big budget special effects blockbusters that litter the genre these days. Though often quite absurd, the spy films of the 1960s placed a great deal of value on cool characters, even if they were one-dimensional, and cool situations. There was an obvious swankness about everything that could never be recaptured these days, especially since the focus is on computer generated special effects far more than it is on characters and sassiness. I try and try to get excited, but nothing about Tom Cruise goofing off in front a blue screen interests me. I like my spy films to look real despite their more fantastic elements, and I also like them to have at least one assassin who wears a fez and sunglasses.

It's the attitude, I suppose, that really sets the films apart. The spy films of the 1960s wanted to be action packed, but they also wanted to be fun. There were very few spy films that took themselves too seriously. Even the big-budget Bond films always maintained a sense of humor. As the spy film moved into the nineties and now the naughties, not only did the focus shift from cool characters and situations to big computer effects, but the sense of fun fell by the wayside. You watch those Mission: Impossible movies, and they are so grim. Everyone takes themselves so seriously as if they are creating some earth-shattering work of art or a cure for cancer. Those guys from the 1960s may have been one-dimensional, but at least they had that one dimension and it was somewhat engaging. The guys now are so dull and frowny. Even James Bond has become little more than a dry prop wandering from one special effects scene to the next. Where's the warmth? Where's the soul?

When Hong Kong decided to get in on the neo spy bandwagon, I figured if nothing else they would return some of the over-the-top fun and action to the genre since they wouldn't be able to afford to rely on expensive and uninteresting computer effects like most of their American counterparts. And hell, Downtown Torpedoes also had a good director in Teddy Chan (Purple Storm, Accidental Spy), and a great ensemble cast featuring three of my favorites -- Jordan Chan (Biozombie), Takeshi Kaneshiro (Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), and the always enchanting Charlie Yeung (Fallen Angels and Tsui Hark's The Lovers). After all was said and done, I was left with a big ol' satisfied smile on my face.

Cash (Jordan Chan), Jackal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Ken Wong (Titan) are three members of a slick industrial espionage team specializing in breaking into high-security complexes to swipe important plans, documents, and sensitive information. The opening scene will fulfill your expectations for such a set-up: they go about everything in a really slick and needlessly complex fashion. It makes for good cinema if nothing else. Since real industrial espionage is mostly guys with fake IDs scamming their way into dingy little rooms crammed with wires and computers or rooting through the dumpster outside AT&T in hopes of stumbling across some secret document that was accidentally tossed into the trash, I suppose I'll go for watching sexy young lads repel down glass buildings and make by the seat of the pants escapes involving tethers and crossbows and things like that.

The team is commanded by the enigmatic Sam, who they have never met. After pulling off a wild heist to open the film, the three filed operatives are approached by Stanley (Alex Fong of the Angel films starring Moon Lee and Lifeline directed by Johnny To), a member of Hong Kong's secret service. He's not only uncovered proof of their various crimes, he's also uncovered the identity of Sam (Charlie Yeung) and unites them all while making a proposition. Seems a rogue British MI5 agent plans to steal some perfect counterfeiting plates and use them to either flood the market with phony British currency or simply sell them off to the highest bidder. The big problem is that while the Hong Kong police know everything, they can prove nothing, and no one in the British government seems to be taking them very seriously.

Stanley wants the crew to break into MI5's headquarters in Hong Kong, steal the plates, and turn them over to the Hong Kong government before the rogue agent can smuggle them out of the building himself. Since no one else believes the story, it's likely the full force of MI5 (for the record, that's the British secret service, of which James Bond was, of course, a member) will come down on them during their attempt. Obviously, no one is very interested in taking such a seemingly hopeless job, but Stanley offers them further encouragement by freezing all their assets and assuring them poverty and homelessness awaits them even if a life sentence in prison is somehow avoided. Having no other choice, they take the job.

Cash reckons they'll need extra help if they are going to break into MI5's headquarters, so he contacts his closest friend, deaf and deft young computer hacker Phoenix (Theresa Lee). The computer hacking is pretty silly, though no worse than what passes for computer hacking in most movies. I mean, it's hard to write a good hacking scene, because hacking consists of some out-of-shape computer nerd sitting in their attic downing Mountain Dew and Doritos. Not exactly scintillating to watch unless you are some weird fetishist. So movies usually go way over the top and throw in all sorts of whirling computer animation and techno music to fool us into thinking it's all very exciting.




At least there are no 3D animated mazes and flaming skulls and stuff like that in this movie. It's not the presentation of the hacking that is the problem, it's just the way they go about it. For instance, Phoenix sets her computer up to "hack into MI5," and then just leaves it running. After a while they've hacked into MI5. The hell? Is that a function on that Microsoft Office I've been hearing so much about? The scheme they concoct is suitably ludicrous and involves repelling, hang-gliding, jet skis, mini-subs, and boats. Probably motorcycles too at some point. It's so wildly over-the-top that I lost track of things.

They manage to pull the heist off, but not without paying a high price. After exchanging the plates for all the evidence against them, Cash, Jackal, and crew find themselves the victims of a double cross. Turns out Stanley was crooked all along, and what they just did was rob perfectly loyal, straight-laced MI5 agents. Oopsie! To make matters worse, The suitcase that supposedly contained the evidence actually contained a bomb. Cash catches on just in the nick of time, and they all manage to leap to safety -- almost. Phoenix catches the full concussion of the blast. To make matters even more complicated, since when it rains it pours, they find out that Sam is not even actually Sam. She's an undercover agent who was working with Stanley because she thought what he said about the rogue MI5 agent was true. And finally, Cash blames Titan for the whole thing since Titan has a drinking problem that causes him to screw up from time to time.

So there you have it -- everyone who is still alive distrusts everyone else. Stanley has the plates AND managed to turn all the evidence against the crew over to MI5. So now they have MI5 and the occasional Stanley-hired hitmen after them. Not a good day. Maybe they should have stuck to rifling through dumpsters and figuring out how to hack the security on the demo version of Adobe Premiere.

Cash and Jackal agree to work with Sam in order to track down Stanley and recover the plates before he has a chance to sell them. They discover he intends to head to Budapest to meet the buyer, but before they can catch him, they are caught themselves by MI5. Needless to say, MI5 doesn't exactly believe their wild stories. With Titan's help, they manage an escape and then pull what I like to call a "Human Tornado."

See, MI5 completely shuts down all avenues out of the country. Every airport, every seaport, every train, every highway. In one scene we have Sam, Cash, and Titan trying to figure out how they're going to get to Budapest and find Stanley. Then in the next scene, there they are in Budapest with no explanation whatsoever.

It's called a "Human Tornado" because Rudy Ray Moore pioneered the amazing feat in his film Dolemite II: The Human Tornado. In that film, Dolemite and his men have a little shoot-out with some racist small-town sheriff and his boys, then run off into a field making ass jokes and saying, "How we gonna get to LA?" Then the next scene is them getting out of a car and going, "Well, here we are in LA." In some prints of the film, there is actually a scene where they get a ride from some stereotypical gay guy, but that's missing from just about every print in circulation now, so for all intents and purposes Dolemite and his men either teleport or run all the way from North Carolina to Los Angeles.

Likewise, Downtown Torpedoes establishes that there is no way our heroes will escape the country, only to cut to a scene where not only have they gotten out of the country, they've also managed to get all the way to Hungary despite their frozen bank accounts and total lack of money. And not only that, they've also managed with relative ease to locate Stanley. Ultimately, it's no worse than the gaping holes that pepper most any spy films, and at least there aren't twenty minutes of people peeling off various false faces and crap like that. Still, it's a pretty major hole in the plot, and even the casual viewer will find it rather annoying and sloppy.

Of course, I like to say they were simply picked up by the hand of Zeus. In classical Greek theater, on more than one occasion, the playwrite would write himself into a corner and end up with the hero in a predicament from which there is no escape whatsoever. In these instances, they would simply hoist the actor up on some wires and claim that Zeus had intervened and lifted the hero to safety. So don't think of Downtown Torpedoes plot hole as crummy writing; think of it as an homage to classical Greek drama.

There's also the little problem with the fact that during their escape from MI5 headquarters, they have to take the chief hostage. When they discover Stanley is in Budapest, they proclaim it loudly right in front of him. There is absolutely no way he didn't know Stanley and Jackal's crew were all heading toward Budapest. Yet not a single MI5 agent, not a single Interpol agent, not a single cop bothers to follow up on this. Instead, for the sake of the movie, they leave the whole thing up to Jackal, Cash, and Sam. It obviously makes no sense whatsoever.

In the end, Downtown Torpedoes is energetic and engaging enough to make it easy to overlook laziness in the writing department. In many ways, it's reminiscent of early 1980s Hong Kong action films. They were very often full of lame characters and mile-wide plot holes, but they were kinetic and action-packed and fun enough to make you not care. They also managed to refrain from insulting the viewer's intelligence, probably because, as I said earlier, they treasured the sense of fun rather than trying to come across as something overly important or serious. Downtown Torpedoes is less fun and more serious than wacky films like the Aces Go Places series, but it manages to conjure up the same exhilaration and thrill. Yeah, the movie is flawed, but what the hell? It's still one heck of a ride.

Downtown Torpedoes came out in 1997, a year when Hong Kong films really started to hit rock bottom. It was an historical year politically, of course, with the handover to China. Kind of funny and not unintentional that this movie, then, is about a treasure being stolen from England and handed over to a crooked Chinese official. Read into that what you will. Anxiety, preoccupation with other affairs, increased Triad exploitation behind the scenes -- there were dozens of reasons the Hong Kong film industry fell apart. While Downtown Torpedoes may not be one of the best movies to ever come out of Hong Kong, it's certainly a good, fun film, and far better than the vast majority of films that came out during the "dark years" between 1995 and 2000, a period from which we're only just now seeming to emerge.

The direction is tight, but I've come to expect that from Teddy Chan. He manages to maintain a tense, fast pace and balance drama, comedy, and action very well, certainly better than they are balanced in the bulk of Hong Kong films. Movies from that city nation traditionally love to mix and match moods and genres, and it's rarely done with much precision or smoothness. Instead, you have fifteen minutes of comedy, fifteen minutes of drama, and fifteen minutes of action in a formula that is repeated until the movie is over. Downtown Torpedoes is a much more even film that integrates all the feeling swell into a fast-paced if somewhat absurd and flawed narrative.

The cast is also solid. Jordan Chan is great as always, and pretty-boy Takeshi Kaneshiro is engaging and charismatic. He's sort of like an Ekin Cheng with actual acting talent. Charlie Yeung is also good, as is Theresa Lee. All of them are basically one-dimensional characters, but since I'm not overly demanding of action films as long as they keep things moving along, I didn't mind the predictability of the characters.

Ken Wong as Titan, on the other hands, stands out from the rest. Granted his character is no less stereotypical -- the lost hero who falls from grace and must redeem himself with heroics and self-sacrifice to save the others -- but he plays it wonderfully, and it's hard not to feel sympathy for his wrongly shunned tragic hero character. Stanley is a properly evil backstabber whose motivations seem to be about as deep as "he is evil and greedy." We're not talking Shiri here, but we are talking lots of action and a movie that is just plain ol' harmless fun.

So it ain't perfect, but then neither am I. If you like to nitpick a film, then Downtown Torpedoes will probably annoy you. It has shallow characters and huge plot holes. But it also has likable characters and lots of fast-paced, well-handled action. As with the Hong Kong action films of the 1980s and the Eurospy films of the 1960s, it's best not to get caught up in the particulars and simply sit back, check your brain, and enjoy the spectacle. Even on a bad day, Hong Kong action films deliver tons worth going nuts over, and Downtown Torpedoes, while certainly a flawed film, is far from a bad movie. I enjoyed the movie immensely. Part Mission: Impossible, part Aces Go Places, all with a kinetic over-the-top pile of action that concentrates on physicality rather than special effects, making it much more fun. If you are like me, then you are probably not slick enough to shoot crossbows or go fight villains in exotic locales. You can, however, sit back and watch Downtown Torpedoes, which is a damn fine way to spend ninety minutes of your life.

Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Year: 1997