Eye in the Sky (2007)

What a pairing: Simon Yam versus Tony Leung Kar-fai! Those names alone would have made this movie a must-see for me. While Leung Kar-fai may be the more acclaimed and versatile actor of the two, I always had a special place in my heart for Yam. I used to call him the "unsung hero of Hong Kong movies", but in the last couple of years he got more attention - especially because he got a string of very good roles in films by Johnnie To: PTU, BREAKING NEWS, ELECTION, EXILED – heck he becomes nearly as much a member of To's stock company as Lam Suet! And he deserves it!
Here he plays once more a cop (he must have played hundreds of them), but this time there is a difference: His "Dog Head" Wong looks like a slob with a potbelly and a stubble on his chin. But that is partly camouflage, because he is an inspector with the surveillance unit of the Honk Kong CIB: their specialty is to shadow and observe people without being seen.
Wong's new mission is to find a gang that robs jewelery shops.

EYE IN THE SKY is more a police procedural that shows the work of the surveillance experts, than a thriller. The film begins with new team member Ho Ka-po (Kate Tsui) who gets the flattering codename "Piggy". By Wong's teaching her the ropes, we learn of the inner workings of police surveillance and get gradually in the case at hand.

The robbers are masterminded by Tony Leung, of course, so the expectations are high. but unfortunately this is no battle of the giants between Yam and Leung like in the first ELECTION movie. The focus is much more on police work than on a cat and mouse game between the two antagonists. Everything is interesting and even exciting, but there is no nerve wrecking tension, and only in a couple of scenes there is the sensation of real danger. So don't expect another ELECTION. Relax, lean back and enjoy a skillfully executed, excellent performed little thriller by first time director Yau Nai-Hoi. The movie often looks like a minor work by Johnnie To and that is no coincidence: Yau has written a lot of scripts for To and the master himself produced EYE IN THE SKY.

A word about the actors: Leung and Yam are up to their usual quality and especially Yam seems to enjoy the role of the fatherly, potbellied slob, he plays. Lam Suet (who is for Johnnie To's movies, what Elisha Cook jr. is for film noir ) has one of the greater supporting roles and fills it as only he can. And new comer Kate Tsui - and Miss Hong Kong 2004 – is surprisingly good in a very central role.

EYE IN THE SKY is a promising debut by Johnnie-To-protegé Yau Nai-Hoi. No master piece but an enjoyable crime picture to watch, while you wait for the next picture by sifu To himself.

Kidnap (2007)

A police operation to catch a kidnapper goes horribly wrong and the victim, a young boy, dies. Hui-yeung, the older sister of the killed child, gets traumatized, but a couple of years later she seems to have found her balance again and even is friends with the police officers who made the fatal mistake.
But now, Hui-yeung (Karena Lam) needs a lot of money to pay a treatment for her seriously ill husband, and becomes a kidnapper herself. Alas, her plan to get ransom from a millionaire misfires: the little boy she caught is not the son of the rich man but of inspector Ho Yuan-chun (Rene Liu) - the leader of a kidnapping task force and incidentally the woman whose team botched Hui-yuengs case.

This is a nice little cat-and mouse-game between two strong and desperate women and it is a show case for Karena Lam and Rene Liu. While Lam has played a couple of characters that balance precariously on the edge (INNER SENSES and KOMA come to mind), it is surprisingly Rene Liu (A WORLD WITHOUT THIEVES) who gives the stronger and tenser performance. Her police inspector and mother taps in unsuspected amounts of resourcefulness, while the stakes for her get higher and desperater. The character even has some darker traits you wouldn't usually expect.
Karena Lam is equally fine as the cool mastermind that has to adapt quickly to the changed scenery when her foolproof plan misfires. There is a certain tenderness and insecureness beneath her ruthlessness and you sympathize with her as much as you do with Rene Lius character.

Unfortunately there are some flaws in the script that diminish the efforts of the excellent actors: director Law Chi-leung (DOUBLE TAP, INNER SENSES, KOMA) relies too much on lucky (or unlucky) coincidences that more than once amount to veritable deus ex machina effects. And than there is a that very amateurish looking stunt/cg-effect near the end....
But for the most part of the movie, Law keeps the tension up and there are only one or two instances when the pace slackens and the characters get a bit lost in their sub-plots.

All in all a fast and often exciting thriller with good performances, a not so good script and a quite weak ending that calls for some goodwilll by the viewer.

Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)

Well, I should have known better, when I read "A Kenta Fukasaku Film", but how could I resist a movie about a movie about a girl going undercover in a tough highschool, armed with a Yo-Yo? But the son of the great Kinji Fukasaku (BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANIY) proves that the destroying of his father's BATTLE ROYALE by making the utterly bad sequel was no accident but proof of his lack of talent as a filmmaker.

YO-YO GIRL COP is the revival of a film- and tv-series from ther 80s, and I don't know much about the earlier incarantions of the yo-yo-wielding girls. But you don't need no background information to understand the new movie. There is a new website that teaches kids how to make bombs and brainwashes them into suicide bombers. After a female undercover cop blows herself up, the police forces the tough daughter of the original Yo-Yo Girl Cop into investigating the school, where the killed cop played the role of a student. Why does the police enlist that girl, who gets the moniker "Saki Asamiya", when she hasn't any training and an extremely bad attitude to boot? Well, ask Kenta Fukasaku....

J-Pop singer Aya Matsuura is cast as Saki, her main adversary and two more important roles are played by the members of pop group "Biyuuden" and all four girls are better than one would think. Especially Rika Ishikawa is nicely menacing as a bad girl with a sweet smile and a deadly Yo-Yo. And the Girl Cop herself, Aya Matsuura, can run and strike good poses, even if her fighting and Yo-Yo-wielding aren't so hot. But with a good director and an acceptable screenplay, she would have made a fun action heroine - in a strictly popcorn sense, of course.

But alas, the plot is utterly diffuse and scattered. The movie needs twenty minutes to start (even though we have a nice fight scene in the first couple of minutes), and is very unfocused. Even the action scenes are not very satisfactory. Okay, it is nice and ironic, when our tough Yo-Yo cop gets hit by her own weapon, when she first uses it, but it is only funny once. An action hero needs to be competent, even in a trashy action comedy.
Worst of all are the sociological and political implications, that are nearly as harebrained and dumb as in BATTLE ROYALE II with its al-Quaida-like rebels without a brain. Here we have to swallow that the pure existence of a website lets every viewer become an anachist and suicide bomber. Well, even V FOR VENDETTA, a somewhat better film, lost me with that witless statement that you can start a revolutin just be telling people they havve to rebel.

So, to wrap this thing up, what do we have here: A wannabe trashy nobrainer with a cute and constantly frowning girl in miniskirts and with a yo-yo; some fight scenes, one or two of wich are at least fun to watch, and a quite inept director who seems to be the son of Ed Wood and not of Kinji Fukasaku. Notwithstanding this underwhelming film I hope that there will be more YO-YO GIRL COP in the future, because I like the idea very much – and Aya isn't a worse action actress than Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu (but don't get me started on their miserabel CHARLIE'S ANGELS abominations).