Handsome but often wooden actor Michael Wong (Beast Cops, The Blood Rules) has made over a dozen in the Option series now, beginning with The Final Option in 1994. That film was a pretty good little action flick which tried to show the personal side of the lives of the men and women of Hong Kong's elite police team, SDU, which is similar to America's S.W.A.T. teams. Over the years these films have faltered in varying degrees. The latest entry in the series, The Revenge, takes the series to new lows.

Shot entirely on video gives The Revenge the look of a student film. Camera angles further that impression, and the sound is at times so poor you can barely hear the actors. The lighting is obviously done by an amateur and there is overuse of a variety of colored filters, which seem intent on altering the mood of a scene, but end up just being annoying. The scenes are either too long or unedited, as though the filmmakers were catering to a single video camera instead of at least two-shot coverage, which is the bare minimum in any film. The result of all of this is a film, which looks amateurish, and without a strong plot, that alone will lose an audience.

As to plot, it appears that the original storyline centered on Stone's (Michael Wong) ability to maintain a loving relationship with Ann (Suki Kwan). But another young lady is interested in Stone, and Ann only supports the woman's actions out of boredom or confusion or both. The sad thing is that this story takes precedence over the so-called "revenge" story of characters Bonnie and Clyde. The rest of the plot is thin and vacuous, and the characters little more than one dimensional.

Michael Wong has done some decent work, but if he continues to pump out dreck like New Option: The Revenge, he is only going to damage his reputation further.

This series is fast becoming more "NYPD Blue" than SDU. While this is in and of itself really isn't a problem, the fact that the acting and script are sub-par (to say the least) definitely is. The script depends far too much on the viewer seeing the previous movies in the series, as there are several scenes which only serve to confuse the new viewer as they deal with minor characters and their sub-plots, such as Shawn Yu's hostess girlfriend getting mixed up with a loan shark.

Things aren't helped any by the acting. Of course, no one's really expecting a film starring Michael Wong to have Oscar-caliber acting, but some of the stuff in here makes cable access look like "Masterpiece Theatre". Making matters worse is some ADR where the voices don't even match -- in some scenes, Michael sports an English accent. When you couple this with the general low-budget production values (once again, this entry is shot on video) and lack of action, The New Option: The Revenge is really only for die-hard SDU film fans that have already exhausted the supply at their local video store.