Thursday, June 13, 2013

Switch
Jay Sun
The story: Dwelling In The Fuchun Mountains is a priceless painting that all the gangsters are after. And hot on their heels is super agent Xiao Jinhan (Andy Lau). His insurance executive wife Lin Yuyan (Zhang Jingchu) is drawn in as well, while Lisa (Lin Chi-ling) is the femme fatale he gets entangled with.

This movie is so stupid that even The Three Stooges would be embarrassed by it.
Essentially, the painting is split into two parts. Different groups of baddies are after them and the clock is ticking away as an exhibition of the joined-together work looms.
The action flits about restlessly from Dubai to Zhejiang to Taipei to Japan and cuts among a British smuggling group, twisted Japanese baddie Yamamoto and a mysterious figure known as Empress.
The set-up is tedious and confusing, and there is zero suspense over who will get the painting and who will double-cross who because one cannot be bothered. Everyone is overacting badly and you wish the cheap-looking scroll would just go up in flames already.
If Taiwanese model-actress Lin Chi-ling thinks this is her big break, she is sorely mistaken.
She is like a dress-up Barbie here – dolled-up in dominatrix leather in one scene, appearing as a nun with a clean-shaven head next and even putting on that tired cliche of a nurse’s uniform. None of the disguises though can disguise the fact that she cannot act.
The other actors do not escape unscathed either.
Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau must be wondering how he ended up in this turkey and his matinee idol smile gets tighter and tighter each time he has to flash it.
Meanwhile, Zhang Jingchu gets to grimace grimly as a bevy of women unleash their killer acrobatic moves on her.
Writer-director Jay Sun pilfers freely from movies such as Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) but does so in a half-baked, haphazard manner.
And stretches of the boring and long-drawn-out flick look like a tourist promotion video for Dubai as the camera pans about the interiors of locales such as Atlantis, The Palm and the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa.
Add woeful-looking CGI to the mix and this is one Switch that will turn you right off.
(ST)