2000 AD
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Peter, his brother Greg, and their pal, Benny are all computer geeks. Greg works for a big firm in the US while Peter and Benny don't seem to work at all. Peter depends on loans from his big brother. On a visit to Hong Kong, Greg is arrested for stealing a program from his company and murdered while being transported by the police. Peter wants to know if his brother was really a spy.
2000 AD seems aimed at a more international audience and less "Chinese" than Gordon Chan's last couple of films. The climactic battle in Beast Cops used machetes while 2000 AD is filled with explosions, large caliber weapon's fire and lots of English dialog. The cop's neighborhood (Tsim Sha Tsui) played a major role in Beast Cops while 2000 AD occurs in generic upper middle class land.
As an action spectacular it is very successful with the best exploding car flip I've seen and hand to hand fights which are very sincere. Some shots, which might otherwise have been too catsupy for a IIb rating, are shown in monochrome, which works very well at emphasizing how dire the event is without being gratuitously gory.
Peter and Benny are stick figures. It doesn't help that Aaron Kwok has a perpetual "deer in the headlights" look which conveys little. Kelvin Wong is a conventional villain who dresses like a cowboy in an attempt to add character. Lesser characters, such as Ronald Ng, the cop, and Eric Ong, the super spy from Singapore, are more interesting, perhaps because they have less opportunity to reveal how little is there.
I would like to see more James Lye, very handsome and more expressive than Kwok. Francis Ng, of course, won a Hong Kong Film Best Supporting Actor Award for this role.
If you are looking for mindless action fun, 2000 AD delivers.
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