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Invisible Target

Reading Time:2 minutes
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Starring: Nicholas Tse Ting-fung, Shawn Yue Man-lok, Jaycee Chan

Director: Benny Chan Muk-sing

Category: IIB (Cantonese)

More than two hours of virtually non-stop action can do little to breathe life into the insipid scenario of what is surely one of the year's most ambitious local blockbusters. Director Benny Chan Muk-sing is a master of staging an action scene or 20, but as he showed in Rob-B-Hood (2006), Divergence (2005) and New Police Story (2004), these sequences are all but neutered by cardboard characterisation and maudlin sentimentality.

In Invisible Target, Chan and co-scenarists Rams Ling Chi-man and Melody Lui Sze-lam have concocted a stale storyline about three young cops in the fight of their lives against a vicious gang. One doesn't expect a pithy plot in genre pieces like this, but there must be at least enough of a story to drive the narrative until the next shootout. These cops are so by the numbers it's agonising.

Chan Chun (Nicholas Tse Ting-fung) is a melancholy but ultra-violent romantic, hell-bent on avenging the death of his fiancee during a daring jewellery store heist. Chun is reluctantly aided by Fong Yik-wei (Shawn Yue Man-lok), a hot-headed rebel with scant regard for the rules when it comes to nabbing the bad guys. Any 'badness' in the two is more than compensated for by new colleague Wai King-ho (Jaycee Chan), a goodie two-shoes whose righteousness and self-sacrifice would put Francis of Assisi to shame.

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