At the other end of the line is Grace Wong, a single mother who is grabbed by a ruthless gang and thrown into a remote shack until she is willing to co-operate. Grace, however, is completely unaware as to why she has been kidnapped and, using her engineering capabilities, re-connects an abandoned telephone line to make the random call. As her captors reveal just how few scruples they have, Grace begs Bob to pick her daughter up from school before she is apprehended. With corrupt police officers and wrongful accusations to contend with, Bob finds his heroic side and tries to find Grace before their connection is discovered.

When it was announced that the competent, yet hardly remarkable 'Cellular' was to be remade in Hong Kong, few cinephiles were counting down the days until it reached cinemas. Benny Chan moved from the thrilling 'Invisible Target' to a 're-imagining' (as I understand the professional terms for this to be now) that nobody had asked for. Yet the concept that Larry Cohen - the ever-imaginative B-movie maestro - had for the original is ripe with dramatic possibilities, the very epitome of that term 'high concept'. Suspend disbelief, no tie disbelief to a missile and launch it into the stratosphere, and the whole story becomes a gripping race-against-time.

Without obvious bias clouding judgement, it is safe to say that Benny Chan's 'Connected' is more consistently entertaining than its inspiration. Some superior action set-pieces help the pace zip along while the varied locations used to stage them adds to the thrill. 'Connected' also concludes with an airport-set finale that is a credit to its director, a man whose skill in the genre should not be ignored. Every drop of tension is squeezed from the narrative, never allowing any plot holes to make themselves apparent. Louis Koo is cast against type as the diffident hero quite successfully while Nick Cheung's solid performance should hopefully ensure that future roles will be dramatic like this rather than 'comedic' in some desperate comedy with 'Conman' or 'Gambling' in the title.

Villains cackle, heroes shout and Motorola is given the kind of plug that verges on the reverent. That said, 'Connected' is outrageously entertaining and maintains its energetic momentum throughout. For anyone looking for an above average Hong Kong action film these days, that should be all the commendation it needs.

The unfortunately named Barbie Xu (seriously, did her agent think that name would make her be taken more seriously as an actress with westerners?) stars as Grace, a software programmer is kidnapped and thrown into a room where her only link to the outside world is a broken phone. Dialing random numbers, she gets a hold of Bob (Louis Koo), a deadbeat dad on the way to the airport to try and patch things up with his son.

Bob doesn't believe Grace's story at first, but after hearing someone killed on the line, he immediately jumps to her aid. Transforming from a nebbishly debt collector to a bad ass, Bob unveils a conspiracy about crooked Inetrpol agents led by Fok (Liu Ye). Powered by Pepsi Max and Motorola cell phones, Bob ends up teaming up with a disgraced cop (Nick Cheung) to save the day.

A major point of how much you might enjoy Connected is the ability to turn off that part of your brain which controls logic. As in, if these awesome Motorola cell phones -- available now at local retailers at very reasonable prices -- apparently don't have call-back functionality, so Bob can't find out where Grace is calling from.

But, of course, driving like a maniac and pulling a gun on random people will eventually unravel the mystery, the major piece of which could have easily been distributed via Motorola's brand new and super-fast 3G network to the authorities, and would have probably made this the shortest "blockbuster" on record. But yet Bob still struggles to get the information to the cops, probably because he likes looking lovingly at the ultra-modern styling on the Motorola MotoQ.

If you can put things like that, as well as "minor" stuff like actual characterization and plot development, aside, then Connected offers a lot of brainless fun. Nicky Li, a long-time behind-the-scenes veteran, has been making himself into being one of Hong Kong's best action directors, and does a great job here. Connected's two major action scenes, a frantic chase through Hong Kong and a shootout at its' airport, are some of the best stuff the former British colony's film industry has put out in years.

It's a shame the rest of the movie can't match the originality and power of the action sequences, because we could have had a true classic on our hands here. But overall, Connected provides enough thrills during its' running time that even the most disgruntled viewer will be should be able to forgive the expository shortcomings if they're willing to put down their thinking cap for the sake of a good time.