Amazon.com reviews for
Yeshou xingjing (1998) Plus avec IMDbPro »

Beast Cops (vhs):

Amazon.com video review: Gordon Chan, best known for directing Jet Li in the action-packed Fist of Legend, trades in hard-hitting kung fu for moody modern street life in the police drama Beast Cops. Anthony Wong (Full Contact) plays Tung, a sloppy, whoring, gambling street cop who lives in the gray area between the law and lawlessness in the most volatile neighborhood in the city. When Mike Cheung (Michael Wong of John Woo's TV-movie version of his Once a Thief), a fastidious, by-the-book officer newly assigned to the beat, becomes his boss and his roommate, they form a veritable odd couple with a surprising influence on each another as a mob war brews on the streets. Chan is more interested in the toll of the job and the influence of temptation on the law enforcers than the usual display of Hong Kong kinetics, but he delivers the goods in a few impressive sequences of mob brawls and vicious machete attacks. The loose mix of street realism, sleek MTV-style visuals, and brooding character drama is more meandering than compelling and the film loses itself as the characters scatter in disconnected stories pulled together only at the conclusion, but Anthony Wong holds it together with an understated performance of a cop faced with his compromises and pushed into violent action by the murder of a friend. Though not as taut as Crime Story or Organized Crime and Triad Bureau, it's an interesting twist on the Hong Kong cop thriller. --Sean Axmaker

Beast Cops (dvd):

Amazon.com video review: Director Gordon Chan, who launched his career in the 1980s with sharply observed social comedies such as The Yuppie Fantasia, moved on to documentary-inflected police procedurals, a gritty Hong Kong subgenre pioneered by Johnny Mak (The Long Arm of the Law) and Kirk Wong (Rock 'n' Roll Cop). Like many younger HK directors, Chan may also have been influenced by the icy-cool Japanese gangster films of Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine). This 1998 entry, Chan's best since The Final Option (1994), is about the redemption of a slobbish veteran cop, played by grizzled Anthony Wong, whose pasty face looks slept in. Knee-deep in corruption and taking bribes with both hands, Wong finds, to his dismay, that the straight-arrow morality of his new young boss (Michael Wong) may be contagious. The film is as much a romantic melodrama as an action film, leisurely and observational, full of eccentric slacker detectives and feral dimwitted gangsters with nicknames like Man-Dick and Pushy Pin. The fight sequences are shot close in, hand held, with vertiginous swoops and swerves, for a claustrophobic sense of terror. --David Chute