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I had read some decent reviews of Tsui Hark’s Time and any excuse to escape the heat wave in the mildly air-conditioned Brattle Theater set me out for a 10PM show. The opening credits looked like something out of Mission Impossible 2. There was some sort of spy music with credits slickly sliding sideways on the screen. I was pretty sure the next scene would involve a sports car or a bomb squad. But thankfully it was still the Asian action film I am accustomed to with less predictability than the Hong Kong-influenced American jobbies. Our hero, Tyler, works at a bar and has a drunken one-night affair with a police officer looking to drown her relationship woes. The problem for down and out, but righteous Tyler ends up being how to make a lot of money to support the resulting love child as well as his dreams of escaping city life for tropical beaches.

Enter Uncle Ji. I remember this guy from Black Mask as King Kow or something, but more memorably as the evil guy with the head-ripper-offer in Heroic Trio. Uncle Ji has a rag-tag body guard business staffed by guys who owe him money from his failed loan shark days. Ji gives Tyler the work he needs, but trusts him only with a pellet gun. Tyler ends up befriending Jack, a former member of a paramilitary evil gang, the "angels", and also a supporter of another, completely different, pregnant woman. They do it all for the women, it’s like the Killer and the eye operation he needs for that whiny girl. These movies are all heart—it’s even got a couple of those songs that sound real pretty and translate into what could be Bon Jovi lyrics. Without giving away too much, Jack and Tyler end up on opposing sides of a big bag stuffed with money, all the while Jack’s former gang buddies are out to kill them both. I really wanted the main baddy to get it. He kept rattling on about cockroaches, "Welcome to cockroach city"; "A cockroach never eats off a clean plate." What? You get the SWAT-type team thrown in at some point too. There’s a particularly amazing sequence in an apartment building which must have been a solid 20 minutes of kick-ass cat-and-mouse chases, Jackie Chan-like stunts and some laughable CGI events.

Here and there it felt like the weird film triangle of an Asian action film emulating American action films which emulate Asian action films. Sort of what happened with the Kurosawa "westerns". Kurosawa, impressed by American westerns, made films which would later be remade as American westerns. There were attempted moments of the now very familiar "pause-pan 360 degrees-explode" type stuff you’d see in say, the Matrix, or Swordfish. Unfortunately, this film does not have the American budget to pull it off as nicely. There are quite a lot of super-stylized film tricks going on. In fact it’s almost rare to see a straight sequence with out wild, random panning or slow motion. But I found I was much more willing to forgive anything I’d rate as way too cheesy and trendy in another film. It all fits into the overall wild mood of what was a much more suprising and entirely entertaining film than I had expected. - Matt, 2001

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