City under Siege is full of promise, but falls short due to clumsy special effects and unsatisfying plot development.

By PAULINE WONG

It was cold, it was dark, and it was the brain of this reviewer who was under siege from the latest offering from veteran director Benny Chan: City Under Siege. Chan, whose list of works include New Police Story, Gen X Cops, Fist of Fury (a popular TV series starring Donnie Yen) and Who Am I? (with Jackie Chan) has worked with some of the best talents in the Hong Kong film industry and received much accolade for his work, only to fail somewhat in his first foray into the action/supernatural/sci-fi genre.

Even though it was full of a promise to be a trailblazer for the Hong Kong film industry in terms of an effects-heavy movie of mind-blowing proportions, the premise of mutants running amok in Hong Kong never quite lived up to the 'effects akin to X-Men Origins: Wolverine', as one website put it.

From the very beginning, you see a very quick flashback of Malaya in the 1940s just before the British defeated the Japanese Occupation. The Japanese, who are endeavoring to create the perfect human soldier via illicit experiments of biological messing-around, are bombed out of their secret underground research facility just when they were at the threshold of creating something evil, monstrous, deadly.

We are then given our first introduction to the 'special effects' - a rubbery-looking and almost laughably unsophisticated monster that looked like the Incredible Hulk on a budget.

But then the movie cuts forward to a travelling circus troupe, in Malaysia, many years later, in which Aaron Kwok plays Sunny Lee, a dim-witted but good-humoured clown who aspires to be a knife-throwing deadshot called Twin-Blades Sunny. He is...not. Even despite being the son of the previous King of Flying Blades. He is generally derided and bullied by the leader and star of the troupe, Tai Chu (Collin Chou), and the rest of his cronies.

Here we glimpse a bit of promise: You see that Sunny could be a sort of an unlikely hero, one you could like and relate to, and you're interested to know the fate of the underdog.

He stumbles upon Chu and his cronies on the verge of finding treasure purportedly left behind by the Japanese. Instead, all of them get blasted with the dangerous toxic chemicals the Japanese were using for their experiments.

Poisoned, each of them stumbles out, half-dead, and puking their guts out. Sunny, however, falls into a fishing boat headed for Hong Kong. The rest of them... are still in Malaysia. I think.

But with the poison comes new found superhuman powers and Chu (and his cronies) uses it to do great evil - robbing banks and such. He is also deformed in looks, yet mysteriously, Sunny isn't.

This is where, though, 20 minutes into the movie, that things get weird and spirals downward. Location logic flies out the window. Things happen that don't quite mean anything. The rubbery, amateurish special effects get worse.

It is all so forced, as if the director had realised last minute that he had to One-Up the Hollywood boys in ALL aspects, be it in acting (over-acting), special effects (everything from popping veins to deformed skulls), Asian-ness (acupuncture, flying blades, kung fu) and not one token beauty, but TWO token beauties Angel (Shu Qi), a TV news anchorwoman and Xin Hua (Zhang Jing Chu), a paranormal policewoman on the trail of Chu and his cronies.

The plot is a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit. It is badly explained with literally no development except for the romance between Angel and Sunny, and Xin Hua and her husband (who is also a cop fighting paranormal bad guys), played by action star Wu Jing.

It became such that towards the end of the movie, one chubby gentleman sitting two rows behind me began laughing.  He almost choked on his popcorn as he struggled to contain his laughter.

It was not meant to be a comedy, so... Ouch.

I feel sorry for the makers of the movie. I do. Because this had the promise of something good for the Hong Kong film industry, since for the longest time, these kinds of movies are thought to be the forte of the Hollywood big boys, and that each and everytime Hong Kong or Chinese cinema try to make one like this, it ends up campy and amateurish.

City Under Siege had a good cast, a solid director, and the really good message that it takes more than deformity and mutation to truly make a monster. It is just such a pity it never quite pulled it off.

Perhaps it is the limited budget, or the fact that Chan really had little experience in the making of a movie like this. But whatever it is, here's to hoping that the next time a sci-fi dish is served from the kitchens of Hong Kong cinema, it will be a gourmet offering, and not mixed-rice from your friendly neighbourhood uncle.

1 1/2 stars