G Storm movie review: Louis Koo in fifth and final instalment of David Lam’s consistently underwhelming anti-corruption action series

2/5 stars

The first four entries in director David Lam Tak-luk’s alphabetically titled anti-corruption action franchise – 2014’s Z Storm, 2016’s S Storm, 2018’s L Storm and 2019’s P Storm – could never be mistaken for pearls of screenwriting. It’s only fitting then that G Storm, the fifth and final instalment in the series, ends up just as laughably ridiculous as the previous four, all weighed down by their half-hearted scripts.

Louis Koo Tin-lok again reprises his role as William Luk, the principal investigator of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) who has got into more deadly shoot-outs than most soldiers have in a war.

“Think you’re 007?”, his police buddy Lau Po-keung (Julian Cheung Chi-lam) says at one point regarding Luk’s drastic departure from his desk job – and this quip might work as a gag if it hadn’t arrived four movies too late.

Little makes sense in G Storm. Suffice to say that a human trafficking syndicate has enlisted the service of a foreign terrorist group and bribed a few officials in the customs, immigration and marine departments in Hong Kong to facilitate their operations.

The story builds towards an absurdly inefficient assassination attempt on “the chief justice of Southeast Asia” (Jessica Hsuan) because she is intent on freezing the bad guys’ accounts.

There are way too many questions you might ask if you leave your brain switched on while watching G Storm: Why must that judge risk the lives of herself and everyone in Hong Kong to give that revelatory speech in this movie’s climax when she could safely expose the villains’ crimes in myriad other ways instead? How does killing her help the bad guys free their money? And why are these ICAC officers even there to fight the terrorists?

While G Storm is padded with enough action sequences to entertain, its incredibly slack storytelling proves a constant distraction.

Consider the thrilling moment Luk walks into the main villain’s office and provokes the character face to face. It is only in the next scene, when Luk is shocked to find a suicide bomber sent after him, that you realise there really is no strategy whatsoever behind his move.

A main character dies when a Hong Kong landmark is blown up – with underwhelming CGI effects – towards the film’s end, but so emotionally inert is the story that you’re unlikely to find even one viewer shedding a tear over this arbitrary development.

If shifting public sentiment in Hong Kong towards the police and ICAC does indeed spell the end for such shoddy crime thrillers as this, let G Storm be the final nail in the coffin.

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