Customs Frontline
Starring Jacky Cheung, Nicholas Tse, Francis Ng, Karena Lam, Yase Liu
A giant ship smashes right through buildings in a Hong Kong harbour. Nicholas Tse fights an angmoh baddie in a sinking submarine like Aquaman vs Black Manta (no kidding!). Jacky Cheung makes a big screen comeback after seven MIA years looking, well, kinda bonkers.
Plot-wise, Hong Kong's port is being used as an illegal arms smuggling hub and the maritime authorities scramble to nail the elusive English-speaking foreign perpetrators and flush out the traitorous inside man within their ranks. Good thing then that both Cheung and Tse can really speak English. “We exercise our right to board and search your vessel,” Tse announces to suspicious ships.
Which sends this big-scale customs-enforcement actioner — featuring crazy ships, planes, helicopters, speeding cars and Tse as a jump-into-speedboat one-man army — basically all over the place.
Literally.
It scoots from HK to international villains in the Middle East to a fictional war-torn country in Africa where Tse, playing go-to customs officer Lai, and Mainland Chinese actress Yase Liu (Sakra), as Thai Interpol agent Ying, get their butts bombed by warplanes.
One question: Is war-ravaged African people in need of Asian intervention the in-thing now for Chinese flicks after both this deal and China's Formed Police Unit?
But the nuttiest place this pic goes to is the face of Jacky Cheung who plays senior customs officer Cheung, Lai's team leader, who's secretly hiding a detrimental medical condition. He suffers from a mental-alarm two-fer — depression plus bipolar disorder. But because he has “high intelligence and high EQ”, nobody knows this.
Including the audience. You have no warning, no inkling, and suddenly, long into the movie, he explodes like the Joker with Cheung doing his maniacal best to cringe his face to show off his most insane “loony eyes” impression. It's unintentionally funny.
Okay, right now, there are two Herman Yau movies in our cinemas — this film and Crisis Negotiators. The latter is the better acted drama because it has Lau Ching-wan leading it.
So I'll just say this: Jacky Cheung, circa 2024, is a better singer than he is an actor.
Now, I'll get the considerable action part of this flick over with first. It is director Yau going into full-on stuntmen-and-CGI overdrive with 10,000-bullet shootouts, a helicopter hauling a container which in turn hauls up a car, and even a James Bond-style spy thingy with infiltration into the shady arms dealer who looks like he plays for an unshaven Eastern European football team. Eurine 2024, anybody?
I counted at least six ticket-worthy action sequences which requires serious medical insurances for the cast. Especially Tse who charges in like a lonely man possessed to kungfu-fight baddies in wherever there's space for the camera. Best one – the inside of the said smasheroo ship where he chalks up million-dollar hazard pay taking on wave after wave (no pun intended) of HK stunt guys on the high seas.
All this despite Cheung telling Lai he needs to be a team player because he's a sulky, blunt dude who can't get along with people.
Anyway, Officer Cheung is latently unbalanced because he himself seems unable to get promoted to anywhere. The dude apparently wants only to drink coffee and buy an island for a peaceful life with his girlfriend, Assistant Commissioner Siu (Karena Lam), who's a higher rank than him.
“Your subpar way of thinking leads to subpar mistakes,” Cheung's shifty boss and Siu's rival for a top post, Kwok (Francis Ng), scolds him. By the way, if you put Customs Frontline and Crisis Negotiators together, you might think Ng couldn't wait to go from a pop-in in the former to do a far meatier role in the latter.
So basically, we have two hearts beating in Customs Frontline. Nic Tse doing his own action movie. And Jacky Cheung attempting a conflicted drama contained within himself.
Director Yau excites with Tse. But looks like he's explored little with Cheung.
Seriously. Where is Lau Ching-wan when we need him? (3/5 stars)