Review | Chasing the Dragon II: Wild Wild Bunch film review – Tony Leung plays notorious criminal in perfunctory thriller
- Notorious gangster ‘Big Spender’ is brought to life by Tony Leung in this clichéd but enjoyable story
- The film is full of generic car chases and shoot outs with a few suspenseful moments, but overall seems half-hearted
2.5/5 stars
There’s a little bit of fun to be had watching four of Hong Kong’s best actors go through the motions in this intermittently entertaining crime thriller. But for anyone who cherishes the care and attention that 2017’s hit Chasing the Dragon has put into bringing the real-life drug lord Crippled Ho – and the old Hong Kong setting – to life, this half-hearted attempt to revive another criminal is bound to disappoint.
In this film, however, the flamboyant mobster, renamed Logan Long and played by the formidable Tony Leung Ka-fai, isn’t even the lead character of his own story. That would be the fictional Hong Kong policeman and explosives specialist Sky He (Louis Koo Tin-lok, also playing a mole in the recent P Storm ), who is urged by his buddy, Inspector Li (Simon Yam Tat-wah), to go undercover and infiltrate Long’s syndicate in Guangdong.
All this is, of course, just a ploy by the filmmakers to appease the Chinese censors: the opening credits helpfully remind us that this immoral tale is set in the pre-handover era, where the “British colonialists’ governance has become lax” – even though Cheung’s exploits actually stretched into 1998. Meanwhile, the Chinese police, led by Captain Zhou (Du Jiang), are painted as heroes despite their peripheral role in the film.