Triple Tap
Derek Yee

The story: After winning a competition, sharpshooter Ken (Louis Koo) drives off – right into an ongoing robbery. He kills the perpetrators, save for one who gets away. Meanwhile, the traffic cop who responded to a distress call ends up in a coma. The case lands in the lap of detective, and fellow shooting competitor, Jerry (Daniel Wu), and he decides to charge Ken with illegal possession of firearms.

The term triple tap is used when a marksman is so skilled that he is able to fire three on-target shots and leave only one hole. It is not a description that would be applicable to this film since it veers wildly off the mark in its concluding third.
A pity since the set-up is actually intriguing. Ken seems to be the unwitting everyman who is reluctantly thrust into the role of citizen hero but there is more here than meets the eye. Is it really coincidence that led him to the robbery taking place on a deserted stretch of highway? Does he really have nothing to gain?
The more one learns about Ken, the more one gets the feeling that something is not quite right. He is a high-flyer in the financial world but he seems like the kept man of his territorial female boss (Li Bingbing). At the same time, he has a girlfriend (Charlene Choi), who happens to be a nurse at the hospital where the traffic cop is being monitored.
Director and co-writer Derek Yee (Shinjuku Incident, 2009) doles out the information in dribs and drabs and tosses a couple of red herrings into the mix.
But after all that work, the script seems to have exhausted itself. When Jerry (above left) asks a more senior officer Miu (Alex Fong) for help, the last thing this reviewer expected was a re-enactment of the crime scene so that Fong could somehow telepathically get into the head of the criminal. It came across like the rejected premise for a show that crosses the psychic TV show Medium with the FBI profiler series Criminal Minds.
Also problematic is the casting of Koo who is grim and glum throughout. As in Accident (2009), he has to shoulder a central role of great ambiguity and once again, he is less than fully engaging.
Those who have seen Double Tap (2000) might be even less enthused since the concept of sharpshooter versus cop is taken straight from there. Yee was co-writer but did not direct that earlier film while the late Leslie Cheung was the marksman to Fong’s CID officer.
Triple Tap can in fact be seen as a “sort of” sequel as Fong reprises the role he played, but the focus has moved on to a new pair of adversaries.
Yee strains to give the Ken-Jerry rivalry an epic feel as they try to outwit each other. Unfortunately, the relationship between the two is more contrived and bland rather than electrifying and grand.
The final shootout is a wildly ludicrous affair in which the measured ambiguity of the beginning has no place and any semblance of plot coherence is utterly blasted to bits.
(ST)