All posts tagged roy cheung

JUST ANOTHER MARGIN (2014) review

Jeff Lau’s Just Another Margin is one of those films that are seemingly tailored for Lunar New Year entertainment but don’t quite have the star power or marketing push required to compete in that prized calendar slot, and are thus slipped in a bit before or after on the release schedule. And it did go by relatively unnoticed, which is not all that surprising considering how uninspired it appears in the Jeff Lau canon of costumed mo lei tau. It stars Betty Sun as Jin Ling, a young woman whose magical yueqin (a kind of round guitar) compels people tell to the truth. One day this creates a humiliating situation for Mrs Zhao (Guo Degang), a rich businesswoman who punishes her by arranging her marriage with the town’s hunchback Mao Da-Long (Lam Suet), with whose brother Mao Song (Ekin Cheng) Jin Ling ends up falling in love. That doesn’t sit well with Shi Wen Sheng (Ronald Cheng) Mrs Zhao’s libidinous cousin, who wants the young woman for himself and plots to take the Mao brothers out of the picture. To complicate things, two aliens from planet B16 named Tranzor and Shakespeare (Patrick Tam Yiu-Man and Alex Fong Lik-Sun) arrive in town in search of a long-lost member of their species. They’re not the only aliens around however, as a fearful entity known as the Black Emperor is hiding somewhere.

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THEY CAME TO ROB HONG KONG (1989) short review

Clarence Fok’s They Came to rob Hong Kong concerns a violent bank robber (Roy Cheung) who has to flee to the Mainland after being nearly caught by a tough cop (Kara Hui). There, he recruits a ragtag team of hapless morons (among which Eric Tsang, Stanley Fung, Sandra Ng, Dean Shek and Chin Siu Ho) to come back to Hong Kong and attempt a daring heist. Except they’re hapless morons, so nothing goes according to plan. This film is actually a complete rehash of any Lucky Stars film : even though only Fung and Tsang were actually members of the comedic team, other members of the cast fit the usual Lucky Stars profiles, as Chin Siu Ho brings the martial arts that would’ve been Sammo Hung’s turf, and Dean Shek has the same kind of paranormal pretensions that Richard Ng’s character would display. The structure is also the same : an action-packed opening sequence (in this case an impressive and savage fight and chase scene on cluttered rooftops, as the terrific Kara Hui hunts down Roy Cheung) gives way to a comedic middle-section where, among other subplots, the group is given a beautiful woman to lust after (in this case, Chingmy Yau), after which things are wrapped up in a big action finale. Except while the action bookends are fine, the comedic middle is painfully unfunny and interminable. While Eric Tsang is always hilarious, Sandra Ng’s shtick quickly gets wearisome, and the ensemble simply doesn’t have the Lucky Star’s chemistry. **

ASIAN COP: HIGH VOLTAGE (1995) review

The second half of the nineties can in a way be considered Donnie Yen’s “dark period”; Yen had earned a reputation as a difficult actor to work with, and alienated himself from the Yuen clan, mainly his mentor Yuen Woo-Ping. Thus, he turned to TV (where he found success with the Fist Of Fury TV series), and to alternate Asian film industries, such as Taiwan or the Philippines. It is in the latter country that he shot Asian Cop: High Voltage (henceforward High Voltage), under the direction of Andrew Kam. In the film, Yen plays Chiang, a headstrong cop (just like he does in most of his contemporary-set films) who gets sent to the Philippines to ensure the safety of an important witness who is the only one who can testify against bla bla bla… There he is partnered with Edu (Edu Manzano), a by-the-book Filipino cop who doesn’t approve of his methods bla bla bla… But Chiang discovers that crazed gangster Dick (Roy Cheung) is involved in the whole affair, and you see, Dick killed Chiang’s wife. So Chiang, who was already a bit of loose cannon, in now an even looser cannon.

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