ReviewBodies at Rest film review: Nick Cheung, Richie Jen play deadly cat-and-mouse game in Renny Harlin’s Hong Kong-set thriller

Die Hard 2 director presents an old-fashioned action film about a criminal trio in Christmas masks who trigger mayhem in a Hong Kong morgue

Illogical yet predictable, and with an off-key performance from leading man Nick Cheung, this plays like a Johnnie To film without the irony and deadpan comedy

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Nick Cheung and Yang Zi in a still from Bodies at Rest (category IIB; Cantonese), directed by Renny Harlin. Richie Jen co-stars.

Published: 6:40pm, 22 Aug 2019Updated: 7:13pm, 22 Aug 2019

2.5/5 stars

For his third feature film since uprooting himself from Hollywood to launch a new phase of his career in Beijing, Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) has opted for an old-fashioned action thriller. Light on humour yet heavy on illogical behaviour, Bodies at Rest is a single-location hostage drama.

Scripted by Wu Mengzhang and Chang You from an original story by David Lesser, it is the tale of a few incompetent thugs who try to destroy the incriminating evidence of a recent murder by staging a heist that turns into a bloodbath involving innocent civilians in a public facility.

It’s a rainy Christmas Eve and workers at a public morgue in Hong Kong are looking to call it a day. Three armed criminals wearing masks (played by Richie Jen Hsien-chi, Feng Jiayi and Carlos Chan Ka-lok) break in, determined to retrieve a bullet from the body of a woman (Clara Lee) they killed in a gang-related incident.

Instead of complying with the demands of the trio, who have wounded an elderly security guard on their way in, the forensic pathologist on duty, Nick Chan (Nick Cheung Ka-fai), decides to trick them by giving them the wrong bullet. When the gang find this out, they return and threaten to kill anyone in their way, including Nick’s intern/romantic interest from Beijing, Lynn Qiao (Yang Zi).