2.5/5 stars
There’s a little bit of fun to be had watching four of Hong Kong’s best actors go through the motions in this intermittently entertaining crime thriller. But for anyone who cherishes the care and attention that 2017’s hit Chasing the Dragon has put into bringing the real-life drug lord Crippled Ho – and the old Hong Kong setting – to life, this half-hearted attempt to revive another criminal is bound to disappoint.
Best known for kidnapping and blackmailing two of Hong Kong’s richest tycoons in the 1990s (the episodes are very briefly recreated here), the notorious ‘Big Spender’ Cheung Tze-keung certainly had the legacy to inspire any filmmaker with a vivid imagination; in fact, a version of him was most recently portrayed by Jordan Chan Siu-chun, in the 2017 Hong Kong Film Awards best picture Trivisa .
In this film, however, the flamboyant mobster, renamed Logan Long and played by the formidable Tony Leung Ka-fai, isn’t even the lead character of his own story. That would be the fictional Hong Kong policeman and explosives specialist Sky He (Louis Koo Tin-lok, also playing a mole in the recent P Storm ), who is urged by his buddy, Inspector Li (Simon Yam Tat-wah), to go undercover and infiltrate Long’s syndicate in Guangdong.
All this is, of course, just a ploy by the filmmakers to appease the Chinese censors: the opening credits helpfully remind us that this immoral tale is set in the pre-handover era, where the “British colonialists’ governance has become lax” – even though Cheung’s exploits actually stretched into 1998. Meanwhile, the Chinese police, led by Captain Zhou (Du Jiang), are painted as heroes despite their peripheral role in the film.
Instead of dramatising Cheung’s most fabled exploits, Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch focuses on Sky’s generic efforts to join the gang as their explosives expert and spoil their next big kidnapping job in Macau. Even the gang members feel awfully clichéd: from Logan’s troublesome brother (Sherman Ye Xiangming) and sexy handler (Sabrina Qiu Yinong) to Lam Ka-tung’s right-hand man with a complicated past.
And though Sky’s participation in the ransom negotiation between Logan and his latest victim’s family introduces suspenseful moments that feel momentarily refreshing, directors Wong Jing and Jason Kwan Chi-yiu swiftly steer the story back to a familiar parade of shoot-outs and car chases. Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch promises to be an exciting true crime story but stops short of offering anything outside the perfunctory.
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