The Black Morning Glory, with Michele Reis (Lee Ka-yan), Lau Sik-ming, Waise Lee Chi-hung, and Lester Chan Kit-man. Directed by Casey Chan Lai-ying. On Newport circuit. End of the Road, with Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Ng Mang-tat, Jimmy Lin Chi-ying, Rosamund Kwan Chi-lam, Tuo Tsung-hwa, and Ray Lui Leung-wai. Directed by Chu Yen-ping. On Regal circuit.
AUDIENCES will shudder - not in fear, but over the complete lack of logic that grips The Black Morning Glory from first murder to final explosion. A modicum of visual style is no substitute for an almost total lack of substance in a series of intrigues that come across as even more phoney than the counterfeit dollars that lie at the story's centre.
Michele (Michele Reis) is a beautiful fashion model on assignment in Japan who unwittingly stumbles upon a video game cartridge belonging to her handsome, good-for-nothing boyfriend, Ken (Lester Chan). This video game should have included a health warning, for its possession proves to have a fatal impact on the model. The ''game'' contains computer graphics for US greenbacks, and when Michele, in a pique of anger, hides the cartridge from her boyfriend, he hires a syndicate to kill the beauty and regain the treasure.
Michele is murdered within the first 10 minutes. But the more I thought about it - and there are plenty of slow spots which afford one time to think - the more it became clear that the murder was not only unnecessary but also demonstrated a sloppiness that would not have been tolerated in a top-notch crime organisation. For the killer disposed of the lady before finding out how she had disposed of the hot property. Only by chance is it discovered that Michele mailed the cartridge to a childhood friend in Hong Kong, Michael (Lau Sik-ming), whom she had not seen since she was five.
Even more incredibly, Michele's assassin is identical in appearance to the woman she has just bumped off. Lin (also played by Michele Reis) discerns too late that her victim is none other than a toddler pal from whom she was separated two decades earlier. We are informed through one of the many flashbacks that the biologically-unrelated twins lost contact when Lin's mother was brutally gang-raped and murdered, and the infant Lin abducted by the murderers - an unusual crime for Hong Kong in the 1970s.
To say the scenario is far-fetched is an understatement even in the world of far-fetched Cantonese screenplays. But while some movies can make a virtue of the absurd, The Black Morning Glory's dynamics are too weak to divert anybody's attention from plotholes that are the cinematic equivalent of black holes in outer space.
The movie doesn't contain one moment that rings true. This includes the entire masquerade that ensues when Lin assumes Michele's identity and returns to her home village in search of Michael and the cartridge. Both Michael and Lin seem the products of arrested emotional development, having too perfect a recall of events that happened in their pre-teen years.