2000AD

Last month when I was at the airport I had some time before my flight so I finally got a chance to check out the 'Hollywood in Asia' store/exhibition area that I first blogged about last summer...    Exhibition-wise it was actually kind of lame, but one thing pretty decent was their store area.  In addition to having some rather unique HK film related merchandise stuff from films like Infernal Affairs,  they had a rather large collection of HK films on DVD.  I was most impressed with the 'top box HK office earners of all time' --  it was really a who's who of HK cinema of the 80s and 90s...  it was impressive in some ways but also kind of sad in another... almost all the top earning movies featured either Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Stephen Chow or Chow Yun Fat...  any only a few were even made in the last decade.  The exceptions were Stephen Chow's Kungfu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, which held the top two spots respectively (with about HK$60 million in BO each).

Anyway, you gotta pay HK$10 to get in but they give you a $10 coupon to use at the store, so I decided to buy something (i haven't been buying many DVDs lately anyway, so why not?)  I found a great deal in the bargin bin... 2000AD!( hkmdb entry) Yes, one of Daniel Wu's relatively early films, where he plays 2nd banana to Aaron Kwok (they would later be reteamed in 2005's 'Divergence', best known for the infamous Filet o' Fish scene).  It was only HK$25, so I got it for HK$15 = ~US$2.00. ;-)

I hadn't seen this since way back when it first came out on VCD, but thats not why I wanted to rewatch it... I wanted to rewatch it because it also features none other than Andrew Lin in one of his early film roles,  he plays a bad guy in the film.  Of course i didn't know him at the time, but now that I know more of his work I wanted to go back and see this early role!

I remember hearing this production had a lot of trouble behind the scenes... it was supposed to be one of Media Asia's big films of the year,  following on the heels of Gen-X Cops which had done relatively well the year before.  It had a relatively big budget, top name talent (Aaron, Daniel and Francis Ng),  and international backing (it was some kind of Singaporean joint production and featured a number of Singaporean stars)....  but something didn't come out quite right.  There were problems w/ some of the logistics in Singapore and a lot of the big action scenes had to be redone at the last minute...  that can't turn out well can it? :-P

Basially It comes off very uneven between the HK and Singapore parts and the script leaves a lot of holes that you can kind of piece together from the character bios on the dvd extras and the plot summary but aren't explicitly clear from actually watching the film... aka stuff that was apparently supposed to be in there that just isn't!

Anyway, Aaron does a pretty decent job, Daniel's part is too one dimensional to make much out of it,  he's basically comedy-relief/side kick guy... of course Francis Ng is awesome as the police detective... the shootout scenes are pretty decent at least... 

But from a pure entertainment point of view,  for me Andrew and his rouge CIA agent character stole the show... yes he does  dress like a suave goateed asian american cowboy (minus the hat) for no apparent reason,  but thats ok...

...cause he looks so damn cool! 

Actually Andrew has been interviewed about this role before by lovehkfilm,  he said "What I really remember is my costume. I hated it. I was wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy shirt. I don't know why. I guess the costume designer thought that since I was playing an American government agent, I should be in a cowboy outfit. An American cowboy -- they made that connection. I don't know why, but I was a cowboy in that film."

There were two things i thought worth going through the hassle of doing screen caps for:

Sorry, can't help but poke a little fun at Andrew....  i'm sure all actors have lots of lines they wish they never had to deliver on camera (for Daniel Wu i'm guessing #1 is still " Hong Kong my ass!" from 'City of Glass',  but thats purely conjecture...)

And I also thought this was hilarious, it was Andrew's character's business card:

Now let's take a closer look at that email address...

aol.com?!  what? the CIA is too cheap to get their own domain name or something? 

just for fun I tried to email calhoun (at) aol.com asking if Kelvin Woo was there, but it got sent back... I didn't try that phone # though...  (let me know who picks up if you want to try).

Anyway,  I don't want to give this one a bad rating, so no score for this one,  its entertaining either way,  especially for hardcore fans of Aaron, Daniel or Andrew...