Cold War 1994

With the handover of Hong Kong from the UK to China already largely agreed, nobody in the territory wants any complications at this late stage in the day. Well sadly that's exactly what the Organised Crime department of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force gets when the tenth uncle of the legendary “Poon” family is kidnapped. It's patriarch, “Sir William” (Gardner Tse Kwan-Ho) isn't a man to be messed with and so swiftly superintendent “M.B” (Terrance Lau Chun-Hin) is drafted in to try and rescue the man before the HK$600 millions is paid for what is more than likely to end up being a corpse! What this honourable cop and his team don’t know is that the heir to the “Poon” family - “Simon” (Wu Kang-ren) is up to some illicit scheming of his own and, of course, the Triads are also positioning themselves for the new regime too. When “M.B.” finds himself caught up in the middle of not just these intrigues but also of some duplicitous internal machinations, he has to go rogue to keep himself safe and hopefully get to the bottom of this politically-charged mystery. Terrance Lau is on decent form here and the production entertainingly integrates the plentiful CGI with the live-action quite well too as the story taps into themes of greed, betrayal, family power plays and police corruption whilst keeping us well clear of any romantic interludes. The plot has it's fair share of twists and turns at the beginning, but the ending is rushed and perhaps just a little too predicable as a perfectly good Rolls Royce is blown to smithereens and the death-defying becomes more the rule than the exception. It's worth a watch, but is disappointingly episodic throughout and lacks for much originality.