Three years after the success of Shock Wave, Herman Yau is back with a thematic sequel that doubled the first film’s budget and has now tripled its box-office take. Andy Lau is back in the lead – inevitably, in a different role – as Poon Sing-fung, a heroic bomb disposal expert of the EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal Bureau) who loses part of his leg in an explosion. Fitted with a prosthetic leg and having gone through an extensive and triumphant reeducation, he fully expects to return to the job to which he devoted himself body and soul, but is instead offered desk jobs or PR positions, as his superiors don’t want to take the risk of returning a disabled officer to the field. Enraged at the rejection, and at a society which undervalues the disabled, he quits the force, severing his relationships to his girlfriend Pong Ling (Ni Ni), an officer of the counter-terrorism unit, as well as his best friend and colleague Tung Cheuk-man (Lau Ching Wan) and their team. Cut to five years later, Poon is seen planting a bomb at a fancy reception; dozens of people die in the ensuing explosion, and he’s found unconscious at the crime scene. When he awakes, he has amnesia and can’t even remember who he is; the police suspects him of being a part of the terrorist organization known as ‘Vendetta’, responsible for a slew of bombings in the past months in Hong Kong. With only fragmented memories coming back to him, but convinced he is innocent, Poon escapes and tries to uncover the truth.
All posts tagged herman yau
SHOCK WAVE 2 (2020) review
Posted by LP Hugo on February 22, 2021
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2021/02/22/shock-wave-2-2020-review/
THE WHITE STORM 2: DRUG LORDS (2019) review
Louis Koo’s third sequel of 2019, after P Storm and Chasing the Dragon II, and before Line Walker 2, Herman Yau’s The White Storm 2: Drug Lords (hereafter Drug Lords) is an in-name-only follow up (for obvious heroic bloodshed reasons) to Benny Chan’s hugely enjoyable 2013 actioner The White Storm. Koo plays Dizang, a triad member who gets severely punished by his boss (Kent Cheng) for peddling drugs in one of his night clubs. Reluctantly dishing out the punishment is his longtime friend Yu (Andy Lau), who cuts three of his fingers. Fifteen years later, Dizang has risen through the triad ranks and become a feared drug lord, while Yu has left the triads and become a billionaire financial expert, married to a successful lawyer (Karena Lam), and founder of an anti-drug charity. But when his illegitimate son Danny falls to his death while high on cocaine, Yu takes his fight against drugs to the next level, promising a 100-million $ bounty to whoever kills Dizang.
Posted by LP Hugo on July 12, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/07/12/the-white-storm-2-drug-lords-2019-review/
A HOME WITH A VIEW (2019) short review
Adapted from a play by Cheung Tat Ming, Herman Yau’s A Home with a View follows a property agent, Lo Wai Man (Francis Ng), who shares a small, cluttered apartment in Hong Kong with his ailing father (Cheung himself), beautiful wife (Anita Yuen) and two kids (Ng Siu Hin and Jocelyn Choi). Surrounded by noisy neighbors and perpetually counting pennies to make ends meet, the family has one daily relief: their view on the sea. So when that view is blocked by a billboard erected by the mysterious Wong (Louis Koo), they’re ready to resort to any means, legal or illegal, to make him take it down. A Home with a View starts like a trite sitcom (with endless shouty bickering and plenty of slammed doors), morphs into a kafka-esque examination of contemporary Hong Kong (where absurd property prices and constant financial pressure lead to a volatile, near dog-eat-dog climate), before plunging headfirst into unexpected depths of macabre – still amusingly belied at that point by the bright hues of the cinematography. Its occasionally stagey feel (no wonder) and disappointingly scattered narrative (intriguing characters, like Anthony Wong’s lovestruck government worker, come and go before amounting to anything) weigh it down, but Francis Ng, Anita Yuen, Cheung Tat Ming and Louis Koo are all on fine form, especially the latter going for less-is-more for the whole film before letting loose in the hilarious, pitch dark final ten minutes. ***
Posted by LP Hugo on May 21, 2019
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2019/05/21/a-home-with-a-view-2019-short-review/
THE LEAKER (aka THE LEAKERS) (2018) review
2018 will have been a quiet kind of year for Herman Yau; The Leaker is one of only two films he’ll have had in theaters (the other being comedy A Home with a View, starring Louis Koo and Francis Ng, and out in December). Still, he’s already got two films in the can for 2019, with two more already planned, so no cause for alarm. The Leaker starts with the outbreak in Malaysia of a new and deadly disease carried by mosquitoes. The only available cure is an experimental drug manufactured by Amanah, a powerful pharmaceutical company. But when the elder son of Amanah’s CEO Teo Jit Sin (Kent Cheng) is found murdered, and his second son is kidnapped by a shady organisation claiming to have incriminating information to leak about Teo Jit Sin, Malaysian detective Lee Weng-kan (Julian Cheung) must team up with journalist Carly Yuen (Charmaine Sheh) and Hong Kong cop Wong Dai Wai (Francis Ng) to uncover the truth.
Posted by LP Hugo on July 22, 2018
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2018/07/22/the-leaker-aka-the-leakers-2018-review/
ALWAYS BE WITH YOU (2017) review
Always Be With You may be a somewhat clumsy title, but it’s still better than Troublesome Night 20, which is nevertheless what this Herman Yau film is. Louis Koo was in seven of these late-nineties, early-naughties horror films that often crossed narratives and mixed some comedy into the mildly tense supernatural goings-on. Now he’s back, surrounded with a cast of newcomers to the franchise (except Law Lan, who was in 17 of the previous installments). A handful of people are brought together by fate on the night of a car accident that claims several lives: there’s a cab driver (Julian Cheung), drunk after learning he is terminally ill, a couple of cops (Louis Koo and Charmaine Sheh), their exorcist auntie (Law Lan) a shopkeeper and his wife (Lam Suet and Kingdom Yuen), a young, freshly-engaged couple (Charlene Choi and Alex Lam), and a few more. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the ones who survived are haunted by those who died, and yet those who died are not necessarily the ones we think.
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Posted by LP Hugo on December 19, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/12/19/always-be-with-you-2017-review/
SHOCK WAVE (2017) review
For Shock Wave, Herman Yau was given the biggest budget of his directing career, and was rewarded with his biggest commercial success yet. Andy Lau plays JS Cheung, a superintendent of the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) Bureau finds himself in the crosshairs of a dangerous terrorist, Hung Kai Pang (Jiang Wu), in whose gang he had gone undercover years ago, and whose brother (Wang Ziyi) he put behind bars. Hung, a deranged bomb specialist, is hungry for revenge and wants his brother out of prison; after challenging Cheung with carefully crafted explosive devices left in public places, he takes hundreds of civilians hostage in Hong Kong’s Cross-Harbour Tunnel, which he has rigged with 1000kg of C-4 explosive.
Posted by LP Hugo on August 22, 2017
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2017/08/22/shock-wave-2017-review/
AN INSPECTOR CALLS (2015) review
Considered a true classic of 20th-century English theatre, J.B. Priestley’s three-act play An Inspector Calls has been brought to the stage countless times since it was first performed in 1945, and it’s been a fixture of the BBC’s TV and radio programming (with yet another mini-series in preparation for 2015, starring David Thewlis) but it has comparatively been the object of few big screen adaptations. In fact, Raymond Wong and Herman Yau’s film is the first time the play is adapted for theatrical release since Guy Hamilton’s (of Goldfinger fame) 1954 adaptation. And surely it’s the most unexpected iteration of the story since the 1979 Soviet mini-series Inspector Gull. Screenwriter Edmond Wong transposes the setting from the North Midlands of Great Britain in 1912 to Hong Kong in 2015, but follows J.B. Priestley’s narrative pretty closely : the mysterious inspector Karl (Louis Koo) pays an unexpected visit to the rich Kau family’s estate. Mr. and Mrs. Kau (Eric Tsang and Teresa Mo) are in the final preparations for their daughter Sherry’s (Karena Ng) engagement party as she is soon to marry a handsome young businessman Johnny (Hans Zhang), while their son Tim (Gordon Lam) looks on in contemptuous bemusement, and clearly annoyed at his own girlfriend, socialite Yvonne (Ada Liu Yan). Inspector Karl informs them that a young woman (Chrissie Chau) from Mr. Kau’s factory has been found dead from what appears to be a painful, protracted suicide by disinfectant ingestion. As he starts to interrogate each member of the family in turn, it appears everyone of them was linked to the deceased woman, and everyone may have played a more or less active role in her eventual demise.
Posted by LP Hugo on April 11, 2015
https://asianfilmstrike.com/2015/04/11/an-inspector-calls-2015-review/
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