Thunder Cop (1996)

Hotshot young cop Ng Chi Lone gets suspended after his intervention makes a mess of an undercover operation. He goes to his regular bar to drown his sorrows, where he meets another man drinking away his troubles. The two become firm drunken buddies, and Lone doesn't hesitate to save his new friend when gunmen burst in and start trying to kill him.

THUNDER COP is a hell of a mess, with a script that veers all over the place like it was written by brainstorming plot points that the writer enjoyed in other films and then trying to shuffle them into the most coherent order he could find. That's probably how a lot of scripts start out to be fair, maybe this one just needed a second pass to distil it down to a manageable number of ideas.

It feels like it was either a vanity project for writer/producer Alan Yuen or a money laundering project for its production company, who never made another film. Either way, Clarence Fok was presumably parachuted in to provide some gratuitous style for the film's action scenes, which he dutifully does. There are quite a few and they are suitably over the top, but don't expect the standard of Naked Killer or Black Panther Warriors - the budget was probably quite a lot lower here. Still, they do raise the temperature of the film.

Star Nicky Wu proves himself surprisingly able and willing in the action for a pretty boy pop star, with his face clearly visible in numerous moves and stunts where there'd have been no shame in handing the shot to a stuntman. He impresses more in those moments than he does as an actor, though.

This is by no means essential viewing, but it's watchable enough fluff.