 |  |  | | | An "extra chapter" in the Young and Dangerous series. With the casting of Tony Leung and Carman Lee in the leading roles, the youth element is apparently played down. And with familiar plot-lines and characters aplenty (from traditional gangster films, swordplay, A Moment of Romance II and even Godfather), the trend is showing signs of fatigue. A rehash, and though not without fine phrases, the film suffers from a ragged visual style that compares poorly with Young and Dangerous 3. Tilted angles in over abundance are both pretentious and meaningless. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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| | | | | At a time when Dior Cheng rides the tide as the good boy who inherits daddy's empire, and Aaron Kwok plays the prodigal son who returns home and gains acceptance, Tony Leung is at last willing to become, without regret, the rebel who refuses to inherit the empire that is forced on him. This may be a new buoy in his career, stepping into the shoes of the romantic hero long vacated from Hong Kong cinema. When Carman asks Tony if he was a believer, he answers: "Yeah, a believer of cults." There he not only draws a line between himself and his character in Heaven Can't Wait, and in his mutually supportive relationship with Jordan Chan, reintroduces "classical qualities" into the definition of idol. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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| | | | | Time and trend wait for no one. The idea of Not so Young and Acceptably Dangerous comes from the Young and Dangerous series, and the very process of imitation and mimicry is extremely condensed. Thus the Chi-hung character is a mutation of Big Brother B in Young and Dangerous I and Laughing Tiger in Young and Dangerous III. On the other hand, the film has a freshness unfound in the series. It comes from Tony Leung's star quality, the wishful thinking on the part of the Carman Lee character, Jordan Chan's mockery of the genre, and propped up by the heavy music that is more fitting to the young and dangerous (than Dior Cheng's crooning love songs). In this film I get a taste of the rebellious. Leung's self-destruction, and Lee and Chan's wailing in the final scene round up an experience of coarse, unrefined romanticism. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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| | | | | A variation on the Young and Dangerous series, the film carries through the series' unfinished experiments - with the world of the drifting swordsman, comic-strip-like swordplay choreography, noble modern protagonists, and unspoken criticism against the triads. But Tony Leung's romantic loafer persona, made-to-measure to give full vent to masculine emotions, dampens the Carman Lee character, an observant woman capable of self-examination. Their love relationship is however portrayed with subtlety. She falls for him because of his resemblance to the legendary hero Yang Guo (from a well known swordplay novel by Louis Cha). He sees in her his mother who has died a horrible death and in the end, he is simply waiting for his mother. A fast draw, he goes about his business according to his feelings. But who would expect that in the killing fields of the triads, he is fragile as a feather. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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