Asian Movie Review: The White Storm (掃毒, 2013)

Although its been out in China for a week or two already, 'The White Storm' directed by Bennie Chan just came out in HK this week.  It's a police / crime drama starring Lau Chingwan, Louis Koo and Nick Cheung.  They're three childhood friends who become police officers in the narcotics division, trying to catch heroin smugglers.

Without giving too much of the story away,  eventually they end up in Thailand and Lau Chingwan is forced to make a 'sophie's choice'  type decision about which friend to save by the evil drug lord.   There's a lot of high drama (ie scenes of people pointing guns at each other in a 'mexican standoff') and shoot em up action to entertain as well as good performances by the three leads.  

The actual plot itself has a few too many leaps of believability,  and a few too many detours into cliches for my taste,  so if you're expecting the next "Infernal Affairs",  you're a bit disappointed, but I think in contrast to last year's "Cold War" this movie delivers a lot more... both as a police thriller and as an action film.

Bonus points for Thai Actress Treechada Petcharat, who plays the transgendered daughter of the drug warlord (who's apparently a very supporting, open minded drug lord, letting his transgendered daughter take part in his business empire along with his straight gendered other son).   

She is quite female looking, so I was thinking it was actually a real woman playing a 'lady boy'.  So after the movie I had to check, and I was suprised to see that Treechada actually is transgendered.  Puts a bit of a spin on her love scenes... :-P

My main criticism of the film is not the over the top unbelievable story twists, so much as the over the top gun play... three cops with pistols can outshoot an unending stream of henchmen with machine guns, enough to make Schwarzenegger blush.

Literately every single character in the movie (except for the transgendered one) gets shot... ....    in this world you can get shot six or seven times in the shoulder, abdomen and legs and still be at 90% effectiveness. You can stand around for 20-30 minutes while your wounds are untreated and not bleed to death.   Yes, you can even sever an appendage and still do MMA fighting too. :-P  

I'll give it a very solid 6/10,  it'd have been higher except for the gun fakery...