Review | Film review: Peace Breaker – Aaron Kwok, Wang Qianyuan face off in Chinese remake of Korean thriller A Hard Day
Lien Yi-chi’s comedy of errors about a crooked policeman and his bad decisions gets transplanted to Kuala Lumpur, resulting in a slickly made thriller that lacks the sadism of the Korean original
2.5/5 stars
Aaron Kwok Fu-shing is having a very bad day in Peace Breaker, a remake of the 2014 Korean thriller A Hard Day. As a crooked Chinese cop on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, his character sees a series of increasingly poor decisions turn a bad situation into a farcical comedy of errors.
Already under investigation for corruption, detective Gao (Kwok) is racing to get to his mother’s funeral when his car accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian. Rather than report the crime, Gao flees the scene and hides the body, only for a mysterious witness (played by an effeminate and strangely enigmatic Wang Qianyuan) to emerge and start blackmailing him.
Film review: One Night Only – Aaron Kwok, Yang Zishan in genre blender
One of the better black comedies to emerge from South Korea in recent years, A Hard Day succeeded by having Lee Sun-kyun’s weaselly protagonist suffer a series of escalating circumstances that he wholly brought upon himself.
Film review: cold war 2 – Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung renew power struggle in political thriller
While Kuala Lumpur adds little to the drama, the sheer level of corruption, extortion and general malfeasance on display – mostly from within the police force – is deemed more permissible when they unfold outside China. One of the biggest changes in the otherwise loyal remake is the addition of Zheng Kai, as a squeaky clean internal affairs investigator sent from China to weed out corruption.
Peace Breaker opens on November 16
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook