Customs Frontline

As happens at least once during the festival, I'm using an afternoon where I don't have anything to watch at Fantasia for... more Hong Kong action, in this case a movie which would have been at the festival 10 years ago, when Well Go was still dipping their toes into rapid North American releases (and convincing Chinese studios to let them) but now just jumps to North American theaters a couple weeks after playing China. Which I like! It's just unavoidably funny when it happens.

Also, compared to most places I go in Boston, the large soda wasn't quite as large and the nachos were enormous.

I would have liked to have seen and written this up Friday, but for a while Cineplex's site was only showing it playing one show late Wednesday, though they either corrected that or put more shows on. With Deadpool & Wolverine set to swallow every available screen, it probably won't last past Thursday in Montreal and I believe today is the last day to see it back home in Boston.


Hoi Gwaan Zin Sin (Customs Fromtline)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Cineplex Forum #21 (first-run, DCP)

I try not to be a person who splits hairs between "good" and "fun" movies; a movie which is fun has undoubtedly been executed well. Customs Frontline occasionally makes me reconsider that stance; it is, on balance, pretty darn fun, but it is also the sort of thing that leads to one shaking one's head, because what you can't recommend about it is pretty darn rough.

It opens with an incident on the high seas off the coast of Africa that sets two nations at war, with the mysterious Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang) appearing to sell arms to both sides. Soon, in Hong Kong, a Customs Service boat crewed by senior officer Cheung Wan-Nam (Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau), Chow Ching-Lai (Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung), Ben (Argus Yeung), and Katie (Michelle Wai) will come upon a derelict vessel full of weapons, its captain leaving a dead crew behind. Suspicion that the weapons are Thai in origin brings a team from their intelligence service, Ying (Cya Liu Yase) and Mark (James Kazama). It's highly fraught behind the scenes, as well - Lai used to date Katie, who is now engaged to another man; Cheung has lagged behind his classmates in promotions, likely due in part to dealing with clinical depression and bipolar syndrome, although he has found a loving partner in Athena Siu (Karena Lam Ka-Yan), the head of the agency's Intelligence & Investigations division; Siu and Cheung's boss Kwok Chi-Kung (Francis Ng Chun-Yu) are up for the same promotion. When Lai and Ying discover that the arms moving through Hong Kong are likely being abetted by someone in the agency, that information winds up taking circuitous routes.

With all this going on, the movie is pretty darn good in the way that matters most, in that there are three or four action sequences good enough to get your attention, from Nicolas Tse sparring with a guy who insists on shooting holes in the the inflatable boat they're standing in to Nicolas Tse fighting a small army inside a cargo shop like Jet Li did in Once Upon a Time in China, except that it's under power and destroying piers in Hong Kong Harbor. Tse is credited with fight choreography right alongside "starring" in the opening titles (Alan Ng Wing-Lun, somewhat later), and he's definitely showing off a bit, working on a number of unstable surfaces and the like. Even in the car chases and to a lesser extent the shootouts, it's the sort of action you admire for its invention rather than the sheer amount of firepower (which is substantial).

As for the rest, well, it sort of feels like director Herman Yau and writer Erica Li are too committed to wrecking stuff and melodrama to do the sort of pure propaganda of Dante Lee's "Operation" movies, which this easily could have become. On the other hand, the narrative around its cops with mental health problems is not great, to put it mildly, maybe even bordering on dangerously misinformed for all I know. Jacky Cheung, especially, is chewing all the scenery the the filmmakers serve him at times, kind of putting the lie to lines about how sometimes mental illness is hard to see, and Nicholas Tse's vacillations between being all-business and uncontrollably emotional are more than a bit weird.

The plot, with the smugglers and their abetters, gets kind of messy as well, with a side trip to Africa and new characters introduced to be quickly killed off. It feels a bit like killing time and taking the longest route from Raw's men stealing something in Hong Kong to trying to smuggle it out. It's hardly fatal, but it's the sort of thing viewers notice rather than rolle with, making them impatient to get back to the good stuff rather than also drawing them into this part of the movie.

Good punches are thrown and vehicles are wrecked in a satisfying enough manner to be worth the price of a ticket. It's not quite old-school-worthy HK action, but it's closer than I expected.