Connected

Starring: Louis Koo Tin-lok, Barbie Hsu Hsi-yuan, Liu Ye, Nick Cheung Ka-fai

Director: Benny Chan Muk-sing

Category: IIB (Cantonese and Putonghua)

Touted as the first official Hong Kong remake of a Hollywood feature, this thriller is a competent showcase of the technical expertise for which our local commercial film industry is justly renowned. But what really distinguishes Connected is not what it gets from Cellular, the middling but far from spectacular 2004 flick on which it is based, but the way director Benny Chan turns the Los Angeles hijinks into a Hong Kong-style action-drama bearing the hallmarks of his Jackie Chan pictures and the slick, hi-tech adventures that have helped make him one of post-handover Hong Kong's most successful commercial filmmakers.

Chan's script adheres to Cellular's story: an intelligent, feisty beauty is kidnapped by a ruthless gang for reasons unknown to her, and her survival depends on a tenuous phone connection with a stranger. The main ingredients for this transformation also represent Chan's strengths and weaknesses as a director: a penchant for high-voltage action and diabetes-inducing schmaltz.

The latter quality comes courtesy of two too many cutesy kids. The mother-daughter bond between widowed engineer Grace (Barbie Hsu) and her little girl is nearly as hokey as the father-son dynamics between single dad Bob (Louis Koo, right), the mild-mannered debt collector on the other end of Grace's post-abduction line, and his boy.