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Beast Cops

Beast Cops

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Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color
  • Widescreen
  • Dolby


Description:

Director Gordon Chan, who launched his career in the 1980s with sharply observed social comedies such as The Yuppie Fantasia, moved on to documentary-inflected police procedurals, a gritty Hong Kong subgenre pioneered by Johnny Mak (The Long Arm of the Law) and Kirk Wong (Rock 'n' Roll Cop). Like many younger HK directors, Chan may also have been influenced by the icy-cool Japanese gangster films of Takeshi Kitano (Sonatine). This 1998 entry, Chan's best since The Final Option (1994), is about the redemption of a slobbish veteran cop, played by grizzled Anthony Wong, whose pasty face looks slept in. Knee-deep in corruption and taking bribes with both hands, Wong finds, to his dismay, that the straight-arrow morality of his new young boss (Michael Wong) may be contagious. The film is as much a romantic melodrama as an action film, leisurely and observational, full of eccentric slacker detectives and feral dimwitted gangsters with nicknames like Man-Dick and Pushy Pin. The fight sequences are shot close in, hand held, with vertiginous swoops and swerves, for a claustrophobic sense of terror. --David Chute
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