Asian Movie Review: Beast Cops (野獸刑警, 1998)

I was browsing through a local video shop here in HK the other day and I saw 'Beast Cops' (野獸刑警) on the shelf. This is a 1998 police/gangster drama that won Best Film and also got Anthony Wong the Best Actor award at the HK Film Awards. It also stars a very young, very buff Michael Wong And a very very young, very very skinny Sam Lee as Anthony Wong's fellow police officers.I had never had a chance to see this one, which by now is venturing into the realm of being considered a 'classic'. Needless to say I had to buy it to check it out. Long time etchy blog readers will know that now that I work in HK I have had the opportunity to work a bit with both Sam Lee and Michael Wong... (but I have had a chance to meet Anthony Wong only once!) so if nothing else I wanted to get a more complete knowledge of these guy's body of work.The cops in 'Beast Cops', despite the title are not really beasts at all... Michael is a relatively straight arrow black and white type commander transferred in to lead Anthony Wong and his squad of grey area 'in too deep' anti-triad plainclothes cops.Anthony's delicate balancing act between the crooks and the law is upset when one of the local crime bosses accidentally kills someone right in front of him and a bunch of eyewitnesses and He can't turn a blind eye. In the wake of the bosses disappearance there is a power struggle that cops are in the middle of, especially when not-so-straight Michael Wong ends up getting involved with the gang boss' ex-gf.The action is relatively slow in developing and a lot of time is spent on the cops personal lives (although Sam's is more for comic relief than anything else...). It's not the best HK crime/cop movie I've ever seen, and this formula has been copied dozens of times since, but Beast Cops is pretty decent. Solid 7/10 from me (+1 comes from the Kathy Chow (周海媚) performance as the gf).