Mou jing shi fen (1993)

User Rating:

5.1/10   

Director:

Johnny Lee

Writer:

Tung-Chuen Chan (written by)

Release Date:

31 December 1993 (Hong Kong)

Genre:

Action

Plot:

Simon Yam plays a former big city cop who had a very bad experince with an AK-47. So he's been assigned...

Plot Keywords:

Police | Hong Kong | Gangster | Phobia

Cast

Kwong Leung Wong	...	Nam
Simon Yam	...	Chan Wai
Li Yu	...	Li Li

Also Known As:

A Day Without Policeman (Hong Kong: English title)
Mo ging si fan (Hong Kong: Cantonese title)

Runtime:

98 min

Country:

Hong Kong

Language:

Cantonese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Hong Kong:III

Filming Locations:

Hong Kong, China

And the award for the most disjointed plot of all time goes to...

A Day Without Policeman, for sure.

The first third of this movie or so is absolute insanity. Not in an over the top good way, but in terms of absolute incoherence. Hard as I tried, I couldn't get more than a rudimentary grip on what was going on. Maybe the literally dozens of characters who we're supposed to magically know one thing or another about as they're paraded in and out of scenes with no real rhythm or reason had something to do with it. It kind of felt like one of those 70's chop socky Kung-Fu flicks where two movies were edited together to make one very confusing and usually crappy film.

Thankfully, the cinematic epileptic seizure ended eventually and the movie started to slowly but surly got itself together. Don't get me wrong, it's by no means great or even solid in my opinion, but it crawled out of the hole it was in.

Incoherent plot, villains with next to no motivation, sub-par acting, shoddy fight scenes, a few near comical scenes in a movie that's supposed to be the epitome of nihilism (A guy blocking bullets with two bricks in the middle of a huge firefight where innocent people are being killed by the dozen) and a "hero" who is too cowardly and incompetent. I can understand him being crippled by his fear... But come on... It gets asinine when the film makers literally rub your face into that fact constantly.

Speaking of incompetence, every "hero" in this film is incompetent. It was almost funny at times. They set elaborate death traps for the villains, and then innocent people are killed in them. Whoops! Didn't seem to be a very big deal either.

Ah, how did I forget this until now... The subtitles are the absolute worst I have ever seen. Peroid. Look at some of the other films I've reviewed and you'll see I'm no stranger to foreign films. They're almost all I watch, so it's not like I'm a stranger to bad subtitles... But this movie... My god. It literally looks like an eight year old did them. Sentences, a good majority of the time, are completely and totally incomprehensible. That coupled with the good sum of this movie being already very confusing, and you've got a cinematic peyote trip. I kid you not. You'll laugh out loud at some of the insane subtitles.

But, it wasn't all bad. It's far from the worst CAT III film out there. Had some scenes which mounted tension nicely, some good squibs, a very mean edge to the whole affair... It just could of been a whole lot more if there was some actual direction in the project.

That's my two cents. Spend them wisely! A 6, maybe a 6.5 out of 10 if I was feeling generous.