Heroic Duo (2003)

Heroic Duo (2003)
Chinese Title: 雙雄
Translation: Duo

 

Starring: Leon Lai Ming, Ekin Cheng Yee-Kin, Francis Ng Chun-Yu, Karena Lam Ka-Yan, Raymond Wong Ho-Yin, Anson Leung Chun-Yat, Samuel Pang King-Chi, Rico Kwok Nik-Hang, Kam Hing-Yin, Xu Jinglei
Director: Benny Chan
Action Director: Stephen Tung Wai

 

Heroic Duo is almost the “lost” film in the filmography of the late Benny Chan, sandwiched between the universally-reviled Gen Y-Cops and Jackie Chan’s New Police Story. It has a unique premise, a fair amount of competently-staged action, and lots of cops getting mowed down, a Benny Chan trademark. It has good-looking actors turning in solid performances and Francis Ng playing a smooth-but-vile bad guy. So why don’t people talk about it as much as Benny Chan’s other movies, including his failures? Let’s see if we figure this out.

The movie begins at the house of a policeman, K. L. Cheung (Kenny Wong, of The Storm Warriors and Invisible Target), who has been taken hostage by a bunch of bad guys, led by The Mission’s Francis Ng. Cheung informs the head honcho that somebody is in prison, after which he is shot to death in front of his wife in cold blood.

Switch to the apartment of Senior Inspector Ken Li (Ekin Cheng, of The Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero), who is plagued by dreams about rescuing some girl from drowning. Li is woken up by a series of phone calls from work regarding an urgent situation. One of the higher ups has recently entered the station’s evidence vault, stolen some files, and then set everything else on fire. During interrogation, the man claims to have no memory of stealing the files. He claims he was hypnotized, flashing back to a bar where a mysterious stranger handed him a drawing of a man and a little girl. Shortly after the interrogation, the officer steals a gun and shoots himself in the head.

As far-fetched as it may seem, Ken isn’t about to discard the hypnosis theory outright. He has men look up records of any registered hypnotists that have ever been prosecuted for crimes. This leads him to Jack Lai (Leon Lai, of City Hunter and Seven Swords), a trained hypnotist and former police psychiatric consultant. Lai has been convicted of manslaughter after apparently shooting a man at his apartment, but has managed to get supervised league to lecture to psychology students at the local university. Ken Li offers to help lighten his sentence if Jack will help him out on this case.

The stolen files belong to a group of policemen who were chosen to work as special security guards at an auction for a series of priceless Egyptian jewels. Jack thinks that whoever had the files stolen did so in order to create a psychological profile of each guard in order to steal the jewels. Ken takes Jack to the auction to keep watch over the proceedings. However, things go south when Jack hypnotizes Ken into stealing the jewels himself, which makes Ken a target for the police, led by the unhinged Officer Yeung (Raymond Wong, of Lifeline and The Death Curse). There is a big shoot-out between the police and the jewelry thieves, but the only one who ends up in police custody is Ken.

Obviously, hypnotism doesn’t go all that far as an excuse in legal matters, so it appears that Ken is up the creek. He does however, have an ace up his sleeve. One of the cops on the case is his long-suffering girlfriend, Brenda (Karena Lam, of Dragon Blade and The White Storm 2). Brenda knows Ken hasn’t done any wrong and Ken convinces her to do a background check on Jack, including his family and friends. You see, before hypnotizing Ken, Jack left in his mind a mental image of a drawing of calm, moonlight sea. Ken is able to recreate the image, which turns out to read “SOS” when viewed from a certain angle. We then learn that the main bad guy, whom Jack calls “Mastermind,” has not only kidnapped Jack’s wife, Mandy (Xu Jinglei, of The Warlords and The Shinjuku Incident), but K.L. Cheung’s widow and children, too. Jack has to get the jewels back in order to protect them, but when do bad guys ever keep their promises? The only external force that can help him is Ken (and Brenda), but Ken has the entire department on his heels…

I like the idea of a violent cop thriller revolving around hypnotism. I wish more had been done with the premise. The movie never really explains how the rather complex orders are given to those hypnotized. The camera does cut away from the scene once the characters are falling into trance, so it might be the traditional, “You will do my bidding…” That surely would have been so cartoony so as to deflate most of the film’s tension. The script also glosses over how exactly the dueling hypnotists can put people into trance so easily. There is a lot of talk about exploiting the back doors to people’s minds, but what we see on film feels more like something that would make a person feel uncomfortable, not give up their free will.

Benny Chan is known for his violent commercial action flicks that pile on the sentimentality whenever it needs to manipulate the audience’s feelings—except Gen-Y Cops. This one does it in measured doses during the second act, but then ruins the climax by hauling in the mawkishness with a dump truck. By the time there is only twenty minutes left, the heroes have converged at the villains’ hideout—a James Bondian-base built under a highway tunnel—and the bad guys’ gang has been whittled down to just a couple. That’s a lot of time for a cat-and-mouse game given the race against time that are heroes are engaged in. Thus we get these drawn-out, slow-motion shots of Leon Lai desperately trying to rescue his loved ones from confinement while the heroes and villains just look on. And when the heroes are able to turn the tables on the “Mastermind,” the idea is a lot sillier in execution than it looked on paper.

The action, staged by Stephen Tung Wai, is solid, albeit unexceptional. Although Tung Wai has been in the game since the 1970s and is often considered one of the top action directors in the business, I have rarely seen him do anything that rose above “workmanlike and efficient.” He can do “slick modern action” like nobody’s business, but very few of his films feature set pieces that are for the ages. This is the case here. Tung Wai fills the screen with gunfights, car chases, a few stunts that Jackie Chan would approve of, and the occasional burst of fisticuffs from Ekin Cheng. There are even a handful of moments where Benny and Stephen set the screen alight with pyrotechnics. I’m sure that when a certain character is enveloped in flames at the end, there is CGI used. But surprisingly enough, it wasn’t so bad as to distract me from the film as a whole, as CGI fire in Chinese cinema is wont to do even to this day. That said, the action still feels like the sort of generic thing that your average Hollywood stunt coordinator could’ve pulled off in 2003.

So why doesn’t anyone talk about Heroic Duo much anymore? I mean, I’m pretty sure people still have fond memories of Gen-X Cops and stuff like that. I’m guessing that once you get past the underdeveloped premise, the film is just too generic, even for an action auteur like Benny Chan. Stephen Tung Wai would have had to have upped his game to A Better Tomorrow levels, or Benny would have had to have cast Donnie Yen in Ekin’s stead, in order to give more chutzpah to movie about jewelry thieves with an unexpected modus operandi.