Cynical Cinema

Invisible Target, out Tuesday from Alliance Films and Dragon Dynasty, fits almost all of the conventions of modern Hong Kong action cinema.  It opens with a gigantic explosion.  It involves a veteran cop, a rookie cop, and a “renegade” cop.  It pays lip service to themes of family and brotherhood.  The central motivation of every single character in the movie is revenge.  There are three hero cops, two corrupt cops, and three hundred and ninety-one dead cops.  And the final scene is a massive, insane, climactic shootout that lasts almost forty minutes.  So that’s the standarad stuff you find in just about every one of these movies.  Unfortunately, Invisible Target rarely rises above the level of average action fare in any other respect.

There are some cool stars here - Jacky Wu Jing, a fantastic fighter who recently appeared in the film Fatal Contact, is the cut-throat bad guy.  Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue are quite good as the veteran cop and the “renegade” cop.  But perhaps the biggest surprise is Jaycee Chan, son of Jackie Chan.  He plays the rookie cop in a remarkable performance.  He is quite convincingly wide-eyed and innocent as the young cop who gets swept up into the middle of a war between a couple of cops and a crazy, bloodthirsty gang of bad guys.  The world of Chinese cinema is populated with dozens of people who, for no good reason, will attack cops with machetes.  There are also the truly bad people, who will murder fifty cops in two minutes as part of a getaway.  These are the bad guys here.  As they are in every one of these movies.

The motivation to take down these evil gangs comes not from the fact that you’ve just lost fifty co-workers.  And the police department can’t get behind a massive effort to take out these mass murderers.  No, it usually comes down to just two or three guys who take matters into their own hands.  And they are motivated to take out this gang because their fiancee has been killed, or their brother.  So it is personal vengeance.  The kind that just can’t come from seeing all your co-workers slaughtered.  In this case, it’s fairly well done, with a few bothersome details.  First of all, in the kung-fu fight scenes, there are bizarre sound effects thrown in out of nowhere.  Like someone yelling da-da-da-da into a microphone.  It’s weird.  And the story is a little incoherent, in that it features what seem to be dozens of unintentional red herrings.

All of which adds up to a decent action film, but nothing special.  The fights are good and well choreographed, the bad guys are convincingly evil, and the plot holes can be glossed over with the suspension of disbelief that everyone who watches one of these movies must bring with them.