Wait what? Why is a picture of the fourteenth prince from Scarlet Heart here? Well, look closely at the movie poster..

Yes.

YES!

十四爷 is acting in this movie!

Movie Title - Black & White: The Dawn of Justice (痞子英雄：黎明再起)

Genre:  + (If you have been a faithful reader, you can easily decode the genre icons given!)

Synopsis: A series of explosions happened one fine day in Harbour City, Hong Kong (海港城), crippling all the major road arteries that leads in and out of the city. The EMP bomb that the HK police were transporting on that day was also hijacked and stolen. Enter the 2 male leads to save the day/city!

Wu Yin Xiong, played by Mark Chao, is the poster boy of the police force in HK. Duh, anyone would want him to be the poster boy when your name is 英雄 (which means Hero). He is the police that solves cases with his feelings and emotions, while Chen Zhen Cai, played by fourteenth prince, is the police that relies on evidence and logic. He also seems to possess some bit of "Sherlock Holmes" abilities in the film, as he was able to connect the dots from scattered evidences intelligently.

The director of this film 自导自演 by playing the stereotypical bad guy with lots of tattoos and the demented thought that total destruction of humanity is saving humanity. It's like saying that I need to spend all my money in order to save money.. uhhhhhh. 

Witness buildings collapsing, airplanes and trains crashing into humans, rocket attacks and an impending biological virus all in this movie!

Review: In this film, the action director from Fast and Furious 5, Jack Jill, was specially invited to direct the opening car-chase scenes, literally "cutting to the chase". After all the car chase and explosions, fourteenth prince shows up with a scene that had everyone in fits of laughter. It was definitely a good start.

Then, the movie slowly revealed its flaws towards the middle: mainly the thinly developed story plot and one dimensional characters, despite that the film lasted more than two hours. 

Firstly, the director put in a lot of effort in the portrayal of his evil character. In fact, he actually damaged his own voice cords in an attempt to add another dimension to the demented mastermind behind the attacks on the city. However, he was so one dimensional that we, as the audience, was not able to connect with him. There was a scene in which he declared himself as God, and everyone laughed in the theatre. It was not because that the scene was funny, but because of the lack of engagement, everyone was not able to suspend their belief for the character and thus, found it silly. 

The CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) in this film was also a pain to watch. In one particular scene, we had a plane crashing into a building. It sounds epic, except that the plane looked like some PowerPoint animation animating across the screen, and that scene lasted for at least 10 seconds. I understand that the budget for the film might not be as huge as those from Hollywood. However, if that is the case, the director should have just focused on 1 or 2 major scenes with CGI, instead of being ambitious and spread the budget in multiple CGI scenes.

The movie picks up again towards the last act. I really liked the last act of the movie, where the main lead confronts the film's main antagonist for an intense fist fight. I promise, that scene where Mark Chao went for the "German Suplex" will delight every single wrestling fans! I clapped my hands when I saw how well-executed the move was. 

Also, there was this girl in the film which I particular liked:



She was super cool in this movie, and I felt that the movie would have been even better if they swapped the roles with him:


Sorry 修杰楷. You will also agree with me if you have caught the movie.

This film opened with an high-impact car chase sequence and closed with an intense, well-choreographed fist-fight, while delighting with numerous action scenes in between. However, the film was not able to achieve its full potential due to its thin plot and characters, which in my opinion, are the keys to a good, memorable movie.

Nevertheless, for an Asian film, it has definitely achieved quite a number of first, like utilising the "ScorpioArm" for the car chase scenes, and building a large container set from scratch. The Evilbean hopes that the bar for Asian films will continue to catch up to Hollywood standard with this movie.

Stay back for: You can watch the credits and spot when the name "Christopher Lee" is going to come out. Yes, THAT Christopher, husband of Fann Wong.

Rating (out of 5 Evilbeans):

  (3)

Watch some behind the scenes videos of this movie at Clover Films Facebook page, who is the Singapore distributor for this film!

And thank you Clover Films for the invite to the Gala Premier of 痞子英雄：黎明再起!