Jackal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Cash (Jordan Chan) work for Available Tactical Mercenaries (ATM) , a group of the world's top industrial spies. With a mixture of James Bond-esque gadgets, "Mission Impossible" theme music, and dubious computer hacking skills, they've just finished their latest job and are ready to kick back in style. Unfortunately, their nights of zipping around Hong Kong in their silver sports cars and talking on their cellphones quickly come to an end when Hong Kong's Secret Service (a.k.a. "The G-Team") brings them in.

Stanley, who runs the G-Team, lays it out. British Intelligence has recently acquired a set of plates used to print money from Iranian counterfeiters. Fearing that the plates will be used to flood Hong Kong's economy with fake money, the G-Team wants Tango, err, Jackal and Cash to break into British Intelligence's headquarters and steal the plates. However, they won't be doing it alone. The G-Team (I love saying that) has also brought in Titan, ATM's tough mechanic, and Sam, their mysterious operations manager who (surprise!) turns out to be a gorgeous woman fond of wearing midriffs. And as added incentive, Stanley has frozen all of their bank accounts and threatens to throw the book at their nefarious deeds.

Grudgingly, our little band agrees (not like they had a choice, right?) and starts scoping out British Intelligence. But not before they recruit the 5th member of their team, a mute hacker named Phoenix who likes to break into NASA's GPS system so she can track birds (only in Hong Kong movies, my friends) . The team makes short work of British Intelligence's fortress-like headquarters, stealing the plates and setting off the most Rube Goldberg-esque chase sequence I've seen in a long time, involving dirtbikes, speedboats, hang gliders, jetskis, and scuba gear.

Now, if you're even a halfway attentive viewer, you know there's a double-cross just waiting to happen. Stanley gives our team the slip and a bomb, which has the unfortunate side effect of killing off the cute, tomboy-ish Phoenix. Cash, who was a sort of father figure to Phoenix, swears vengeance, while Sam looks cute in her midriff and Jackal throws out bewildered looks as only Kaneshiro can.

Before you can say "suspension of disbelief", our foursome soon find themselves in a complex web of lies and deceit. Well, it's not so much complex as it is convenient. Could the skin cell they find in Stanley's empty apartment possibly be his, or could it be part of some elaborate plastic surgery? Only one way to find out! Break out the portable mass spectrometer and analyze the DNA! Could the URL they find in a hitman's jacket possibly provide clues as to Stanley's whereabouts, and could those clues possibly be hidden in the Internet crossword puzzle they solve in 30 seconds? Thankfully, our team is capable of making even the farthest leaps in logic, pulling the right answers out of thin air almost instantly. And when that doesn't work, the plot helps them out, giving them a break right when they need it.

Now, I realize it might seem like I'm being hard on this movie, but I really do mean it all in good fun. After all, I spent most of this movie chuckling and have a great time. "Downtown Torpedoes" is not a movie to take seriously, no matter how straight the actors try to play it. Actually, I'm glad that the actors played it straight, rather than yuck it up onscreen. The fact that they take it so seriously lets the viewer off the hook, meaning you don't have to take it seriously one bit.

I'm not surprised that people like Teddy Chan and Jingle Ma were involved in this movie. Teddy Chan also directed Jackie Chan's "The Accidental Spy" and "Downtown Torpedoes" has a similar vibe with its numerous locales and slick, commercial look. Jingle Ma wrote and directed "Tokyo Raiders", which might just be "Downtown Torpedoes"' fraternal twin. Both movies have the exact same look and feel, from the multitude of gadgets to the attractive cast (though in the end, "Tokyo Raiders" is the flashier and more polished of the two) .

I've always been a fan of Takeshi Kaneshiro, who I first saw in Wong Kar-Wai's movies playing some sort of quirky, lovelorn loner. However, here he does the action thing pretty well and still manages to look handsome and sensitive. I'd actually forgotten he was in this movie, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him pop up onscreen. Jordan Chan plays off of Kaneshiro pretty well as the loud, rambunctious Cash, making their partnership a pretty easy thing to buy.

As far as the other cast members go, they're pretty generic. Then again, nothing in their roles requires any sort of stretch. Charlie Yeung (Sam) only has to look good in a midriff (which she does quite well) , Ken Wong (Titan) just needs to look surly (and take the occasional swig from his flask) , and Teresa Lee (Phoenix) just needs to look cute as a button to get our sympathy.

When you break "Downtown Torpedoes" down to its individual parts, it's nothing special. But when you put them all together, throw in a decent budget, the obligatory fight scenes (which featured some of HK cinema's first CGI usage) , and a portable mass spectrometer or two, it makes for a pretty enjoyable, if lightweight movie. And that's all I really wanted.

REVIEW:
It seems that big conspiracies have been the popular theme in big-budget action movies in the Hong Kong in recent years. Downtown Torpedoes is no exception. It is far from pretentious, plainly offering pretty faces, big-budget action, and your obligatory consipiracy plot. It's not in a position to turn the genre on its head, thanks to a number of flaws, but might provide a solid single-viewing "popcorn" movie, as long as you aren't looking for anything profound.

Once again, we see the big international conspiracy plot brought in for Downtown Torpedoes. Downtown Torpedoes actually hits a lot of the cliches we hold for such movies, from the traditional conspiracy plot twists all the way down to the traditional international conspiracy, James Bond-ish music style. Unfortunately, if you are looking for the plot to be mind-blowing, you will be disappointed. This isn't a mindbender or a thinking man's movie. There are a few holes here and there, and the characters are fairly one-dimensional. The film, though, is not pretentious and does not really try to be anything more than what it is. It's definitely light-wieght summer action movie fare.

The action itself is fairly solid. I actually would liked to have seen more of it. In particular, the first major action sequence has some very nice hand to hand combat, above the level of which I expected for this movie. Chan and Kaneshiro bust in with their half-masks (a nice touch - if a little much) and take down the guards in style. The shootouts in the film aren't quite as impressive as the little hand-to-hand bits, but still fairly solid. No John Woo fare, but just as good as one might expect from a big budget action film. We even have our explosions that no movie of this type would be complete without. Yes, they are gratuitous - but that's because we want them. I'm also fairly satisfied at how well the action was captured. There wasn't too much MTV-style editing in the fights to where it got distracting and took away from the actual moves. Everything is captured stylishly without overdoing it.

Downtown Torpedoes should be taken as nothing more than a popcorn flick. It's story is fairly cliched, the characters are pretty one-dimensional, and it has got the obligatory big-budget action. If you are looking for a classic, stay away. If you are looking to kill a Saturday night and don't mind leaving your brain behind for a bit, you'll enjoy this as a solid action movie.

Borrowing a bit from the Mission: Impossible movies, the story has Jordan Chan, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Theresa Lee, Ken Wong and Charlie Yueng as a team called ATM (Adavnced Tactical Mercenaries), who perform high-risk industrial theft "jobs". After a successful job, they are brought in by the MI5 (British CIA, led by Alex Fong in an extended cameo role) to steal money printing plates from a rogue agent. The job turns out to be a double-cross, and the ATM team must try to find the plates to clear their name.

From the get-go, Downtown Torpedoes sets itself up as a slick spy caper and it doesn't disappoint. The movie mixes in just enough high-tech gear and gutsy action to make it both believeable and exciting at the same time. In a time when many films mistake computer gimmickry for action, it was refreshing to see more of a straight-forward style. As always with these types of movies (especially ones that are a few years old), not all of the gadgets make sense or look great, but overall the spy action in Downtown Torpedoes is well-done, culminating in a climatic chase scene that is one of the best done (in either the US or HK) over the last several years.

Even though the plot is reminiscent of Mission: Impossible, thankfully Downtown Torpedoes isn't as convoluted as those films. Even though there is a fair amount of double-crosses, hidden agents and other plot twists, the story is easier to follow because of the movie's efficent storytelling. The film-makers realized that we don't need to see each detail of every character's life, and this helps move Downtown Torpedoes at a brisk pace. Even the dreaded mandatory romantic subplot fails to rear its' head here, and the film flows much better as a result.

The emphasis here is on spy hi-jinks, not mushy love stories. This streamlined storytelling is welcome in this day and age of movies that try and pretend to be more important than they are by dumping everything but the kitchen sink into the mix. From top to bottom, Downtown Torpedoes is a solid action movie that's worth your time.

Still, I've always dreamed of that daring life, though I've also dreamed of being a fireman, an astronaut, and a guy with the power to decide who lives and who dies. If I can't be a spy, then I'll do the next best thing, which is sit around in my underwear eating Bagel Bites and watching spy movies.

It's probably no shock to anyone that I consider the spy films of the 1960s to be vastly superior to the big budget special effects blockbusters that litter the genre these days. Though often quite absurd, the spy films of the 1960s placed a great deal of value on cool characters, even if they were one-dimensional, and cool situations. There was an obvious swankness about everything that could never be recaptured these days, especially since the focus is on computer generated special effects far more than it is on characters and sassiness. I try and try to get excited, but nothing about Tom Cruise goofing off in front a blue screen interests me. I like my spy films to look real despite their more fantastic elements, and I also like them to have at least one assassin who wears a fez and sunglasses.

It's the attitude, I suppose, that really sets the films apart. The spy films of the 1960s wanted to be action packed, but they also wanted to be fun. There were very few spy films that took themselves too seriously. Even the big-budget Bond films always maintained a sense of humor. As the spy film moved into the nineties and now the naughties, not only did the focus shift from cool characters and situations to big computer effects, but the sense of fun fell by the wayside. You watch those Mission: Impossible movies, and they are so grim. Everyone takes themselves so seriously as if they are creating some earth-shattering work of art or a cure for cancer. Those guys from the 1960s may have been one-dimensional, but at least they had that one dimension and it was somewhat engaging. The guys now are so dull and frowny. Even James Bond has become little more than a dry prop wandering from one special effects scene to the next. Where's the warmth? Where's the soul?

When Hong Kong decided to get in on the neo spy bandwagon, I figured if nothing else they would return some of the over-the-top fun and action to the genre since they wouldn't be able to afford to rely on expensive and uninteresting computer effects like most of their American counterparts. And hell, Downtown Torpedoes also had a good director in Teddy Chan (Purple Storm, Accidental Spy), and a great ensemble cast featuring three of my favorites -- Jordan Chan (Biozombie), Takeshi Kaneshiro (Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels), and the always enchanting Charlie Yeung (Fallen Angels and Tsui Hark's The Lovers). After all was said and done, I was left with a big ol' satisfied smile on my face.

Cash (Jordan Chan), Jackal (Takeshi Kaneshiro) and Ken Wong (Titan) are three members of a slick industrial espionage team specializing in breaking into high-security complexes to swipe important plans, documents, and sensitive information. The opening scene will fulfill your expectations for such a set-up: they go about everything in a really slick and needlessly complex fashion. It makes for good cinema if nothing else. Since real industrial espionage is mostly guys with fake IDs scamming their way into dingy little rooms crammed with wires and computers or rooting through the dumpster outside AT&T in hopes of stumbling across some secret document that was accidentally tossed into the trash, I suppose I'll go for watching sexy young lads repel down glass buildings and make by the seat of the pants escapes involving tethers and crossbows and things like that.

The team is commanded by the enigmatic Sam, who they have never met. After pulling off a wild heist to open the film, the three filed operatives are approached by Stanley (Alex Fong of the Angel films starring Moon Lee and Lifeline directed by Johnny To), a member of Hong Kong's secret service. He's not only uncovered proof of their various crimes, he's also uncovered the identity of Sam (Charlie Yeung) and unites them all while making a proposition. Seems a rogue British MI5 agent plans to steal some perfect counterfeiting plates and use them to either flood the market with phoney British currency or simply sell them off to the highest bidder. The big problem is that while the Hong Kong police know everything, they can prove nothing, and no one in the British government seems to be taking them very seriously.

Stanley wants the crew to break into MI5's headquarters in Hong Kong, steal the plates, and turn them over to the Hong Kong government before the rogue agent can smuggle them out of the building himself. Since no one else believes the story, it's likely the full force of MI5 (for the record, that's the British secret service, of which James Bond was, of course, a member) will come down on them during their attempt. Obviously, no one is very interested in taking such a seemingly hopeless job, but Stanley offers them further encouragement by freezing all their assets and assuring them poverty and homelessness awaits them even if a life sentence in prison is somehow avoided. Having no other choice, they take the job.

Cash reckons they'll need extra help if they are going to break into MI5's headquarters, so he contacts his closest friend, deaf and deft young computer hacker Phoenix (Theresa Lee). The computer hacking is pretty silly, though no worse than what passes for computer hacking in most movies. I mean, it's hard to write a good hacking scene, because hacking consists of some out-of-shape computer nerd sitting in their attic downing Mountain Dew and Doritos. Not exactly scintillating to watch unless you are some weird fetishist. So movies usually go way over the top and throw in all sorts of whirling computer animation and techno music to fool us into thinking it's all very exciting.

At least there are no 3D animated mazes and flaming skulls and stuff like that in this movie. It's not the presentation of the hacking that is the problem, it's just the way they go about it. For instance, Phoenix sets her computer up to "hack into MI5," and then just leaves it running. After a while they've hacked into MI5. The hell? Is that a function on that Microsoft Office I've been hearing so much about? The scheme the concoct is suitably ludicrous and involves repelling, hang-gliding, jet skis, mini-subs, and boats. Probably motorcycles too at some point. It's so wildly over-the-top that I lost track of things.

They manage to pull the heist off, but not without paying a high price. After exchanging the plates for all the evidence against them, Cash, Jackal, and crew find themselves the victims of a double cross. Turns out Stanley was crooked all along, and what they just did was rob perfectly loyal, straight-laced MI5 agents. Oopsie! To make matters worse, The suitcase that supposedly contained the evidence actually contained a bomb. Cash catches on just in the nick of time, and they all manage to leap to safety -- almost. Phoenix catches the full concussion of the blast. To make matters even more complicated, since when it rains it pours, they find out that Sam is not even actually Sam. She's an undercover agent who was working with Stanley because she thought what he said about the rogue MI5 agent was true. And finally, Cash blames Titan for the whole thing since Titan has a drinking problem that causes him to screw up from time to time.

So there you have it -- everyone who is still alive distrusts everyone else. Stanley has the plates AND managed to turn all the evidence against the crew over to MI5. So now they have MI5 and the occasional Stanley-hired hitmen after them. Not a good day. Maybe they should have stuck to rifling through dumpsters and figuring out how to hack the security on the demo version of Adobe Premiere.

Cash and Jackal agree to work with Sam in order to track down Stanley and recover the plates before he has a chance to sell them. They discover he intends to head to Budapest to meet the buyer, but before they can catch him, they are caught themselves by MI5. Needless to say, MI5 doesn't exactly believe their wild stories. With Titan's help, they manage an escape and then pull what I like to call a "Human Tornado."

See, MI5 completely shuts down all avenues out of the country. Every airport, every seaport, every train, every highway. In one scene we have Sam, Cash, and Titan trying to figure out how they're going to get to Budapest and find Stanley. Then in the next scene, there they are in Budapest with no explanation whatsoever.

It's called a Human Tornado because Rudy Ray Moore pioneered the amazing feat in his film Dolemite II: The Human Tornado. In that film, Dolemite and his men have a little shoot-out with some racist small-town sheriff and his boys, then run off into a field making ass jokes and saying, "How we gonna get to LA?" Then the next scene is them getting out of a car and going, "Well, here we are in LA." In some prints of the film, there is actually a scene where they get a ride from some stereotypical gay guy, but that's missing from just about every print in circulation now, so for all intents and purposes Dolemite and his men either teleport or run all the way from North Carolina to Los Angeles.

Likewise, Downtown Torpedoes establishes that there is no way our heroes will escape the country, only to cut to a scene where not only have they gotten out of the country, they've also managed to get all the way to Hungary despite their frozen bank accounts and total lack of money. And not only that, they've also managed with relative ease to locate Stanley. Ultimately, it's no worse than the gaping holes that pepper most any spy films, and at least there aren't twenty minutes of people peeling off various false faces and crap like that. Still, it's a pretty major hole in the plot, and even the casual viewer will find it rather annoying and sloppy.

Of course, I like to say they were simply picked up by the hand of Zeus. In classical Greek theater, on more than one occasion, the playwrite would write himself into a corner and end up with the hero in a predicament from which there is no escape whatsoever. In these instances, they would simply hoist the actor up on some wires and claim that Zeus had intervened and lifted the hero to safety. So don't think of Downtown Torpedoes plot hole as crummy writing; think of it as an homage to classical Greek drama.

There's also the little problem with the fact that during their escape from MI5 headquarters, they have to take the chief hostage. When they discover Stanley is in Budapest, they proclaim it loudly right in front of him. There is absolutely no way he didn't know Stanley and Jackal's crew were all heading toward Budapest. Yet not a single MI5 agent, not a single Interpol agent, not a single cop bothers to follow up on this. Instead, for the sake of the movie, they leave the whole thing up to Jackal, Cash, and Sam. It obviously makes no sense whatsoever.

In the end, Downtown Torpedoes is energetic and engaging enough to make it easy to overlook laziness in the writing department. In many ways, it's reminiscent of early 1980s Hong Kong action films. They were very often full of lame characters and mile-wide plot holes, but they were kinetic and action-packed and fun enough to make you not care. They also managed to refrain from insulting the viewer's intelligence, probably because, as I said earlier, they treasured the sense of fun rather than trying to come across as something overly important or serious. Downtown Torpedoes is less fun and more serious than wacky films like the Aces Go Places series, but it manages to conjure up the same exhilaration and thrill. Yeah, the movie is flawed, but what the hell? It's still one heck of a ride.

Downtown Torpedoes came out in 1997, a year when Hong Kong films really started to hit rock bottom. It was an historical year politically, of course, with the handover to China. Kind of funny and not unintentional that this movie, then, is about a treasure being stolen from England and handed over to a crooked Chinese official. Read into that what you will. Anxiety, preoccupation with other affairs, increased Triad exploitation behind the scenes -- there were dozens of reasons the Hong Kong film industry fell apart. While Downtown Torpedoes may not be one of the best movies to ever come out of Hong Kong, it's certainly a good, fun film, and far better than the vast majority of films that came out during the "dark years" between 1995 and 2000, a period from which we're only just now seeming to emerge.

The direction is tight, but I've come to expect that from Teddy Chan. He manages to maintain a tense, fast pace and balance drama, comedy, and action very well, certainly better than they are balanced in the bulk of Hong Kong films. Movies from that city nation traditionally love to mix and match moods and genres, and it's rarely done with much precision or smoothness. Instead, you have fifteen minutes of comedy, fifteen minutes of drama, and fifteen minutes of action in a formula that is repeated until the movie is over. Downtown Torpedoes is a much more even film that integrates all the feeling swell into a fast-paced if somewhat absurd and flawed narrative.

The cast is also solid. Jordan Chan is great as always, and pretty-boy Takeshi Kaneshiro is engaging and charismatic. He's sort of like an Ekin Cheng with actual acting talent. Charlie Yeung is also good, as is Theresa Lee. All of them are basically one-dimensional characters, but since I'm not overly demanding of action films as long as they keep things moving along, I didn't mind the predictability of the characters.

Ken Wong as Titan, on the other hands, stands out from the rest. Granted his character is no less stereotypical -- the lost hero who falls from grace and must redeem himself with heroics and self-sacrifice to save the others -- but he plays it wonderfully, and it's hard not to feel sympathy for his wrongly shunned tragic hero character. Stanley is a properly evil backstabber whose motivations seem to be about as deep as "he is evil and greedy." We're not talking Shiri here, but we are talking lots of action and a movie that is just plain ol' harmless fun.

So it ain't perfect, but then neither am I. If you like to nitpick a film, then Downtown Torpedoes will probably annoy you. It has shallow characters and huge plot holes. But it also has likeable characters and lots of fast-paced, well-handled action. As with the Hong Kong action films of the 1980s and the Eurospy films of the 1960s, it's best not to get caught up in the particulars and simply sit back, check your brain, and enjoy the spectacle. Even on a bad day, Hong Kong action films deliver tons worth going nuts over, and Downtown Torpedoes, while certainly a flawed film, is far from a bad movie. I enjoyed the movie immensely. Part Mission: Impossible, part Aces Go Places, all with a kinetic over-the-top pile of action that concentrates on physicality rather than special effects, making it much more fun. If you are like me, then you are probably not slick enough to shoot crossbows or go fight villains in exotic locales. You can, however, sit back and watch Downtown Torpedoes, which is a damn fine way to spend ninety minutes of your life.