The Viral Factor
Dante Lam
The story: Police special agent Jon (Jay Chou) goes to Malaysia to track down his estranged father and elder brother. There, he gets entangled in a bio-terrorist plot involving the smallpox virus. Medical specialist Rachel (Lin Peng) is kidnapped for her expertise by none other than Yang (Nicholas Tse), Jon’s brother.

The Viral Factor is not particularly festive in subject matter (who would like a dose of smallpox to go with their bak kwa?), but it might just be the flick to turn your Chinese New Year holidays into a blast.
The thriller’s US$17-million (S$22-million) budget shows in the globe-trotting story and big-scale action sequences. It was filmed in China, the Middle East and South-east Asia and even used “real military weapons”, boast the production notes.
Things get off to a pacey start when an operation to protect some key personnel in Jordan goes horribly wrong. Agent Jon and his fellow team members are betrayed by a traitor in their midst and he takes a bullet in the head.
Granted, The Viral Factor can be preposterous as big-budget action thrillers are wont to be, but director Dante Lam makes it entertainingly so.
Lam – known for his taut police thrillers including Beast Cops, which won for Best Picture and Best Director at the Hong Kong Film Awards in 1999 – knows his action and given the opportunity to work on a bigger canvas, he runs with it. There are rocket launchers and bombs in the streets of Jordan, car chases and helicopter chases in Malaysia and a fiery gunbattle finale that is set on a container ship.
This is top-notch carnage and wreckage and one marvels at the level of cooperation that must have been extended to the production crew in Malaysia in shutting down roads and a train station, and even allowing for choppers to weave between skyscrapers. It seems unlikely this could have been filmed in Singapore and certainly there is no way our cops would have been allowed to look this incompetent.
Mandopop superstar Jay Chou, looking all grungy and scruffy, is clearly gunning for more grown-up appeal, even as he indulges his inner child on his latest album, Exclamation Point (2011).
His co-star Tse, though, is the one who stands out. As the tattooed “righteous thief” with a bad perm job and his daughter’s life on the line, he is the guy you end up rooting for.
In 2010’s The Stool Pigeon, he had gamely endured being knocked about and becoming increasingly bruised and battered, physically and emotionally. Here, he is shot at, beaten up, flung off and flung down a building. Someone give the man an award for dedication to his craft already. And comprehensive insurance coverage.
(ST)