Cold War
Director: Leung Kar-yan
Year: 2000
Rating: 5.5
Pop open the cold
champagne! Christy Chung is back on the big screen. OK – so maybe you weren’t
even aware that she hadn’t been in a film since 1997 – but all the same I
am glad to see her once again. HK films need all the star power they can
get these days and Christy was always more of a media star than an actress
anyway. Over the last three years she has been taking care of her baby girl,
having problems with her ex(?) - husband and being a spokesperson for a chain
of fitness centers in HK.
This film might seem like an odd choice for her to return to. It’s not a
typical Christy Chung romantic/comedy role – but instead it is a dark action
film with plot themes that mildly echo The Killer. Christy takes on the Sidney
role to Simon Yam’s ultra efficient professional killer. She hires Simon
to make numerous hits – but knows that at the end she will be ordered to
silence him.
The film gets off to a quick if convoluted
start – and within seven minutes of running time it has switched locales from
the Chinese/Burma border to Hong Kong to Manila back to Hong Kong and finally
to Seoul where most of the film takes place. I imagine this is a HK/Korea
co-production and there are a number of Korean actors in the cast though
the VCD is all in Chinese.
The confusing beginning initially lends
the film a semblance of intriguing mystery – who is behind Christy – why
is Simon being ordered to kill over a dozen men – why was Simon’s wife murdered
– but as the film finally begins to jell it also takes on a fairly mundane
nature. The script also lets it down with numerous instances in which the
characters magically seem to know things that beg explanation – how do the
bad guys know where Simon is hiding out – how do the cops know his name –
and what on earth was the opening war scene from 1992 all about?
Simon is pretty solid here as a killer looking for an explanation of his
wife’s murder – even when having to recite dialogue such as “I only trust
my gun. Though I trust my gun, I don’t love it”. Whether he sleeps
with it goes unanswered. During a hit, a woman is wounded and Simon takes
her to the hospital. Soon he has the bad guys after him as well as a pair
of relentless Korean cops – and he has to turn to the wounded woman for help.
For some inexplicable reason – other than Simon helping get her cat down
from the roof – she is willing to sacrifice everything for him. I know Simon
is charismatic and all, but still this was a bit farfetched.
There is a decent shoot out in the end
- though how the bad guys with enough firepower to start a small war manage
to miss Simon is a mystery – and in the final moments there is a nice homage
to “A Hero Never Dies”.
The film has a decent beginning and a good ending with a lot of filler in
between. Christy is fine – whether involved in a point blank gun exchange
or in a locked lipped lesbian kiss. One annoying thing was that I think other
actors dubbed both her and Simon and at times the mouths and voices were
not very well synched. Vincent Wan also co-stars as one of the bad guys.