Bullet and Brain by Keung Kwok-Man (2007)
22 January 2008You have to be wary of any film with Wong Jing attached, and since he wrote and produced this one, I should have known that it might be time to stay away, but having Anthony Wong and Francis Ng in the leads with Eric Tsang in a supporting role made me buy it. This was a mistake. I still do pick up Wong Jing films because he occasionally makes either a really funny one, or an enjoyable one, but this film is neither, in the fact the only laughs you will get is because it so bad. The story is ridiculous and overly convoluted, and the awful acting of Pop Idol Alex Fong really helps to forestall even a decent performance out of the leads. This is an absolute do not waste your time kind of film.
In an unnamed future city (shown in awful still skylines that I could have done better in my sleep) a triad boss named The Principle has decided to get out and go legit, but his underling Winston (Andrew Wu, damn this guy looks like he could be Ekin Cheng’s long lost uglier brother) betrays him. The Principle gives his beloved granddaughter Rain (Tang Yan) a key to his safety deposit box and a code get into it, as well as 2 halves of a bill, that if mailed with bring in his best friends, the famed killers Bullet and Brain to save her, then he leaves and is killed. Rain is meanwhile being watched by the police and they have sent an inexperienced cop (Alex Fong Lik-Sun) to protect her. Of course the cop does an awful job, and the bills get sent out, and in come Bullet (Francis Ng Chun-Yu) and Brain (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang). These two both have issues though, and will no longer kill, as Bullet pines over an ex lounge singer who was killed, and Brain worries about a young girl he saved, whose family was killed.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILER…
Winston needs his dead boss’s money so he can pass it onto Simon Chung (Eric Tsang Chi-Wai) and get more money back to run a casino or is it to satisfy his new girlfriend, who was the Principle’s girlfriend before they betrayed him, who knows, and it really doesn’t matter.
Bullet goes down to Winston’s club and falls for another lounge singer there, and Brain moves in with the now grown up and hot, and Winston starts sending bad guys after them, which they quickly and easily dispatch. They duo end up saving Rain and also taking the cop, and then the girl that Brain saved turns out to be an assassin and they capture her as well.
Bullet stupidly goes into a trap set by Winston, and he and the lounge singer and trapped in a glass tank filling with water (why can’t bad guys just kill people), but they are saved by Brain and the cop.
They then go after Winston who is meeting with Simon Chung, but everything turns upside down (and seems to make the film much easier to get by Chinese censors) and it turns out that in fact Simon Chung is Bullet, Bullet is in fact Brain, and Brain is actually a police chief, who is going to be Alex’s boss. When the assassins heard, they went straight to the police to set Winston up, and everyone goes away happy, though Rain never did get the number for the account, so she can never get the money.
•••••
Damn this film is lame! Really, really lame! Sucks that such good actors do such crap sometime, but what can you do?