Exotic dancer Dai Jet Lo (brawny man) has a gift to see through “cause and consequence”. He meets a female cop and uses his gift to help her capture an extremely dangerous murderer. The female cop learns that Dai Jet Lo was once a monk who, due to the murder of a friend, left the monastery to find the killer. The female cop also has an inevitable “karma” that dooms her to die an unnatural death. The duo decide to oppose “cause and consequence” and change what cannot be changed.

I’m still trying to make both heads and tails of what I have just watched. To say the film lacks coherence is understating an obvious fact,as it comes across as an incomprehensible, illogical cauldron of scenes place together in some contrived manner. It all makes sense at the end, but you’re not quite sure what the hell you’ve been watching for 90 minutes, and in the end you’re left feelng fairly unsatisfied.

Let’s get the good things out of the way first. The fight scenes were good when they occurred, being both balletic and fantastical at times. It was funny watching two Indians in a Hong Kong film doing the martial arts dance, but they did really well and it was great to watch. Andy Lau is pretty flexible here as he always is, in both ability and speed. He’s no Jet Li, Donny Yen or Jackie Chan, but what he does he does well. I also like the fact that there is a bit of originality in the character appearance, the set pieces and some of the plot. It’s odd, but likeable.

With that out of the way, down to the facts. The plot does make sense, it is predictable, but it’s also incredibly vague and nonsensical. It’s not so much a case of red herrings (as I explained the film is predictable), it’s just that, for whatever random purpose, the script decides that almost every scene will be something completely different. In some respects, it comes across as an experimental film, with the story hashed together best they can in order to have it ready for shooting.

I liked what they did at times, and you get the gist of it halfway through the film. It’s not the predictability that annoyed me, it was more the unrealistic nature in which the characters react to the instances in the film. There is no flow, no consistency in either the characterisation, or the plot. Even the direction is all over the place.

The film is pretty dumb for the most part. Andy Lau is for me, the Keanu Reeves of Hong Kong – good looking, but all his expressions look the same. He’s as wooden as freshly made table at IKEA. My pinky finger has more acting talent, but is it big in Hong Kong? No! I don’t think it’s an ugly pinky. But I digress.

How do you write a review, when the film makes little sense? It’s a tough question I’m having to deal with right now. Without giving something away that is substantial to the plot, you won’t be able to comprehend the sheer lunacy of the writing. The female supporting lead is so annoying, so inept at being anything more than a pretty face that you wish she were dead.

What you’re supposed to feel for her is sympathy and sorrow at her misfortune. It’s not entirely her fault of course, it doesn’t help that she says the word “Sorry” about 30 times during the course of the film (this may be an exaggeration, but it felt annoying after the first five times) and she’s presented as a weakling who needs a man to save her retarded behind.

It also doesn’t help that the rest of the cast acted like frustrated homosexuals trying to restrain themselves from expressing their gay desires. Either that, or they really needed to go to the toilet. If you remember the episode of Friends with Joey doing an audition where he needs to urinate but isn’t allowed to; imagine that, but a room full of Chinese men doing it, and you have comedy, not drama.

What also grates in this film is the unintentionally comedic soundtrack. Instead of being sentimental it comes across as cheesy; when it tries to become more paced and dramatic, it’s the sort of music you expect to see in a cheap budget horror where they sue the same piece of poorly dramatic music repetitiously. It’s a horrific soundtrack, and I can only slap the music editor with a wet kipper for his incompetent effort of creating any form of atmosphere with the audio – which itself is half the movie.

I find it odd though, that even after everything is said, the film isn’t God-awful, it’s just very average and very incoherent most of the time. I did enjoy the ending, and it was perhaps the best part of the whole film. Yes it makes sense at the end, but the journey to the end is a difficult one, not due to the vagueness of the journey, but the sheer drag of the joruney. Many rules of traditional film making are thrown out of the window (not your average male hero, action, story and so on), but what you get is quite a mess. It’s not bad, it’s just not good.

Verdict: Average action-cum-drama, lacking cohesion.Worth a rental.