Operation Mekong (2016)

Operation Mekong (2016)
Chinese Title: 湄公河行動
Translation: Operation Mekong River

 

Starring: Zhang Hanyu, Eddie Peng, Joyce Feng, Ken Low, Sun Chun, Chen Baoguo, Carl Ng Ka-Lung, Mandy Wei Man, Pavarit Mongkolpisit
Director: Dante Lam
Action Directors: Stephen Tung Wei, Jack Wong

 

Operation Mekong is based on a real-life incident, in which drug runners in the Golden Triangle massacred Chinese fishermen aboard two boats in the Mekong river. In this movie, the drug dealers plant boxes of drugs on the boat in order to frame the Chinese. The bodies wash up on the shores of a village in Thailand (or Burma or Laos--the film jumps so much and so quickly between the three countries that I suppose I could say that it takes place in generic Southeast Asialand) and it's all over the news that Chinese drug dealers were murdered, presumably by rivals. But the People's Republic of China can't have its image stained by this. Suspecting that foul play is afoot, they set up a four-nation coalition to fight drugs, and send stubborn, but dependable officer Gao Guo (Zhang Hanyu) and his team of subordinates (including a German Shepherd named Bingo) into SE Asialand to find the drug dealers responsible and bring them into China to be tried for their crimes of murdering and framing the morally-upright Chinese people. They meet up an undercover agent (Eddie Peng), who has found one of the guys responsible and successfully tortured a confession out of him. Things heat up when they try to extract Eddie's moles from the drug dealing operation. Will anyone survive?

Much like Wolf Warrior 2, I have mixed feelings about this film. Both films jump back and forth between the rousing and disturbing, with the latter being played up to the point that you almost feel guilty for the adrenaline rush the action gives you. I don't know if the filmmakers based all aspects of the film on facts, or if simply one of the film's five writers had seen Eastern Condors and Blood Diamond too much. A lot of villainy outside of the initial bloodbath revolves around the simple fact that our villain, Naw Khar (Pavarit Mongkokpisit), employs child soldiers in his operation, getting them hooked on drugs and sending them on literal suicide missions. And when said children aren't setting off bombs or shooting people with automatic weapons inside public places, they're doing coke, smoking opium and playing Russian Roulette. And unlike Eastern Condors, they're not using POWs as proxy victims; and we see the aftermath of one such game. The Hong Kong Action Brand has long established itself as an entity that you can admire and enjoy even when everything else about a movie is substandard. There's something icky about getting that special HK adrenaline rush while wading through scenes of African people getting slaughtered en masse (with regards for Wolf Warrior 2) or the vilest of child exploitation in the case of this film.

Indeed, there is no shortage of adrenaline-pumping action in this film, which brought Stephen Tung Wei yet another Hong Kong Film Award. Much like Dante Lam's The Viral Factor, the action here is as varied as it can be without going full-on tank battles and dogfights. There are foot chases, car chases, boat chases and dog chases. Plastic explosives, grenades, RPGs and satchel charges provide the pyrotechnics crew with ample explosions to work with, although the Chinese CGI programmers still can't friggin get fire right. Gunfights break out in shopping malls. Is there hand-to-hand combat? Of course there is! There are a few one-on-many scuffles in the first half, which focus mainly on takedowns and arm locks, enhanced with Bourne-style camerawork and editing. Twice our heroes have to defend themselves against a bunch of nameless lackeys armed with machetes and hatchets. Those fights go by really quickly, though.

And then there's the finale, which runs for a good half-hour and frequently threatens to get so bloated that I'd call shullbit on the operation. We begin with our standard raid-on-a-jungle-village, the likes of which we've seen in Supercop; Predator; and Angel II. That means that LOTS of nameless SE Asian troops armed with AK-47s are going to get blown away, complete with bright-red CGI blood clouds. Eddie Peng also faces off against one of the main targets in a knife fight, the film's only sustained fisticuffs sequence. There is also some tunnel combat, because of course there is. And finally, there's an interesting wrinkle to the proceedings: a Burmese(?) army unit run by a corrupt officer (Vithaya Pansringarm, of Only God Forgives and Ninja: Shadow of a Tear) has shown up to eliminate the targets before the Chinese can extract them. That draws the climax out further, giving us a forest shootout, a graphic scene of people being dismembered by tripwire explosives, and finally the aforementioned boat chase. That last one goes on so long that it actually becomes tiresome after a while. Yes, there's such a thing as too much action...and I hate it when films end on boat chases. Oh, and this is a movie where Eddie Peng walks off the shrapnel and shockwave of a nearby grenade explosion.

If the length of the climax is one liability, then another is that the characters are dressed in matching camo outfits with their faces covered in camo paint. As a result,  it's not always easy knowing who gets shot (or killed) at a given moment. But it's not like that really matters, since we barely get to know anyone as it is, so only our two leads and The Token Female (Project Guttenberg's Guo Bing) really stand out, and the latter only because she's the only member of the team with a vagina and her codename is Aphrodite. Heck, Bing the dog has more personality than everyone on the team save our two leads. And when you get to the final scene, which I won't spoil, you'll notice that the filmmakers realized this, too. To sum it up, as a mindless action film, Operation Mekong delivers, I guess. But to anyone expecting anything more, I remind you this is the film where most of the cast is out-acted by a CGI dog running through a mine field.