Asian Movie Review: Beast Cops (野獸刑警, 1998)
I was browsing through a local video shop here in HK the other day and I saw 'Beast Cops' (野獸刑警) on the shelf. This is a 1998 police/gangster drama that won Best Film and also got Anthony Wong the Best Actor award at the HK Film Awards. It also stars a very young, very buff Michael Wong And a very very young, very very skinny Sam Lee as Anthony Wong's fellow police officers.
I had never had a chance to see this one, which by now is venturing into the realm of being considered a 'classic'. Needless to say I had to buy it to check it out. Long time etchy blog readers will know that now that I work in HK I have had the opportunity to work a bit with both Sam Lee and Michael Wong... (but I have had a chance to meet Anthony Wong only once!) so if nothing else I wanted to get a more complete knowledge of these guy's body of work.
The cops in 'Beast Cops', despite the title are not really beasts at all... Michael is a relatively straight arrow black and white type commander transferred in to lead Anthony Wong and his squad of grey area 'in too deep' anti-triad plainclothes cops.
Anthony's delicate balancing act between the crooks and the law is upset when one of the local crime bosses accidentally kills someone right in front of him and a bunch of eyewitnesses and He can't turn a blind eye. In the wake of the bosses disappearance there is a power struggle that cops are in the middle of, especially when not-so-straight Michael Wong ends up getting involved with the gang boss' ex-gf.
The action is relatively slow in developing and a lot of time is spent on the cops personal lives (although Sam's is more for comic relief than anything else...). It's not the best HK crime/cop movie I've ever seen, and this formula has been copied dozens of times since, but Beast Cops is pretty decent. Solid 7/10 from me (+1 comes from the Kathy Chow (周海媚) performance as the gf).
posted by ラフィ at 4:28 PM
0 comments
