Andy Lau and Alan Tam play a gambling/con artist duo, supposedly the best in Asia (and, thinking about it, this would probably be true, since they seem to have the ultimate "poker faces," never changing expression throughout the movie). They get invited to a Las Vegas casino to help shut down a ring of Japanese Yakuza who are cheating and breaking the bank. It takes them about ten minutes to figure out the scam (something silly involving reflective watch faces) and everything seems cool. The pair then concentrate on getting laid. Eventually, Tam hooks up with a Japanese heiress who wants him to go straight. Though Lau wants to keep the pair active, Tam agrees and heads back to HK. Without Tam by his side, Lau eventually gets caught by the Japanese and has his hand crippled. In a plot device obviously lifted from A Better Tomorrow, Tam must decide whether to stay on the straight and narrow or help his friend get revenge.

On paper, this seems like a pretty good plot. However, much of the middle portion of the movie has nothing to do at all with gambling and really grinds the movie down. There aren't even the usual Wong Jing toilet jokes to keep things lively. The eventual gambling showdown at the finale is pretty good, but it's the old case of "too little, too late." This one's probably only for hardcore Andy Lau fans only, and even they might be disappointed since he doesn't run around shirtless or sing a bunch of ballads like most of his other movies.

This is a somewhat mis-shaped film that came about at the beginning of the gambling film craze, but it really has very little gambling in the film. It is much more of a "buddy film" that wanders about aimlessly (but with some charm) for the first half like a Hope/Crosby road film ... until it takes on some suspenseful melodrama in the second half. Some how, the film managed to keep me engaged ... and much of that oddly had to do with a surprisingly solid performance from Andy. On occasions, Andy leaves the "idol" image behind and focuses on creating a character.

Andy (Crab Chan ... but I don't want to even hazard a guess as to how he picked up that nickname!) and Alan (Sam) are great friends, scam artists and gamblers ... and Rosamund Kwan is their Dorothy Lamour. The two of them are called to Las Vegas to help out a friend who runs a casino there. The casino is losing millions of dollars to a few gamblers and though the friend is sure they must be cheating he can't figure out how. It takes our boys about five minutes to figure it out and then they are out on the town for some fun. Here Alan meets the daughter (Chan Yuk Lin) of a wealthy HK businessman and courts her by hiring a roomful of Hollywood stuntmen to stage a phony barroom brawl. Hey, whatever works.

The three of them troop back to HK where Alan gives up gambling for the love of this woman and Andy takes up with Rosamund. But it turns out that the cheaters in Vegas were killed and their Japanese Yakuza backers are not very pleased and they come after our two boys. This leads to some fairly good scenes ... there is one with Andy that is a classic melodramatic moment that only HK films provide anymore. Of course, there is the big gambling showdown at the end. I should mention that it had the fifth highest box office in HK in 1989.