City Under Siege

Benny Chan

The story: While searching for gold, a group of circus performers stumble upon an old cache of Japanese biochemical weapons. By chance, Sunny (Aaron Kwok, far right) manages to purge most of the poison from his body and ends up with superhuman qualities. The other four become freakishly powerful, mutating into creatures with claws and coloured hair. Predictably, both Sunny and the lead villain Tai Chu (Colin Chou) fall for a newscaster named Angel (Shu Qi, right).

The superhero film gets the Asian treatment but unfortunately, the end results are unlikely to be saving anyone’s day.

For a while though, it seems as if producer, director and co-writer Benny Chan is on the right track.

His “creation” myth is plausibly rooted in history, imagining that the Japanese conducted wartime experiments in Malaysia to develop killing machines.

After the exposition accounting for how Sunny and company end up with their powers, the action shifts to Hong Kong. Tai Chu and his gang are now wreaking havoc on the city with their outrageous criminal exploits and only Sunny is able to stop them.

This could have worked as a tight superhero versus supervillains flick. Unfortunately, Chan, who last helmed the action thriller Connected (2008), then proceeds to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the film.

There is the romance angle between Sunny and Angel and the spanner in the works, Tai Chu, who develops an infatuation with the pretty newscaster as he grows ever more hideous and lonely.

Then there is Sun Hao (Wu Jing) and Hua (Zhang Jingchu) of the special police, who are bent on taking down the criminals.

It is never explained how the two know about the mutants’ condition or, more problematically, why they are not immediately pulverised in combat with them.

And we are not done yet. There is also a cynical satire of the media and advertising industry when Angel gets herself appointed Sunny’s sole agent and proceeds to market the heck out of him.

This would have worked better if it was not crowded out by all the other elements, making the film sprawling and unwieldy.

The relationship between Sun Hao and Hua is supposed to be touching but we barely spend enough time with them to care. There is more time devoted to the Sunny and Angel tie-up, but Kwok, once again, is trying too hard and you can see the effort in his acting.

And then 90 minutes into the film, we get a treading water interlude of Sunny being trained by Sun Hao and learning how to deal with the mutants.

It does not even set one up for the final showdown with Tai Chu since there does not seem to be anything particularly specific or difficult that Sunny has to do.

Ultimately, there is simply too much going on and while the action sequences are competent, the pace slackens every time Chan chases after another sub-plot. Not even Superman can pull all these disparate threads together.

(ST)