Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Bullet Ballet/ Drama/ Romance/ Suspense
Director: Wong Gam-Din
Year: 1994
Rating: 
NOT WORTH YOUR TIME
How is it possible that The Most Wanted is so weak? You’ve got a cast that includes Lau Ching Wan, Kent Cheng, Bowie Lam, and Robin Shou. In fact, the cast is uniformly strong. The basic plot is interesting, too. There’s even a decent action sequence halfway through the movie. And yet The Most Wanted has to be counted as a failure.
Cat (Lau Ching-Wan) is an undercover cop. He shares a jail cell with Sap (Bowie Lam) in the hope that Sap will eventually ask him to join his gang of jewel thieves, headed up by Yip Huan (Robin Shou). But Yip Huan is cautious and takes his time before asking Cat to join the gang.
The Finance section of the police department gets impatient and orders Cat’s boss to halt the undercover operation. Their timing couldn’t be worse. Sap takes Cat to a meet and greet with Yip Huan. Officially, Cat is no longer undercover, so if he takes part in a crime, there’s no guarantee the police will provide him with immunity from prosecution. Cat decides to go ahead with the undercover operation anyway, with disastrous results.
Now, to me, this is an original twist on the time-honored undercover cop story. The Most Wanted has all the elements to be exciting, suspenseful, and heartbreaking. There’s Cat himself, put into an impossible position by his superiors. There’s also a personal dimension to Cat’s dilemma. If he succeeds in busting the jewel thieves, he’ll have to take down Sap, who has become his friend. Your heart bleeds for Sap, as played by Bowie Lam. The writers also add a romantic element. Cat saves Lily, an undocumented worker, from a robber, and she later cares for him when he’s wounded. Eileen Tung is sympathetic in the role of Lily. All of the beats in the story are good ones. There’s even a fairly exciting action sequence, choreographed by Mark Cheung, although director Wong Gam-Din almost ruins it with some poor editing and pacing.
So, where does The Most Wanted go wrong? Like most Hong Kong movies, The Most Wanted is short at 91 minutes, but there isn’t enough plot to fill out the picture. Incredibly, it took three screenwriters to come up with this arid little exercise. There should have been room for a half a dozen twists at least. Worse yet, individual scenes are written poorly. Developing a romance between Lau Ching Wan and Eileen Tung should have been a breeze, but the dialogue and pacing is so poorly done that you feel almost nothing. The ending, which by all rights should have been tragic, left me cold.
Another problem: director Wong Gam-Din doesn’t pace his scenes properly. Most of them drag, some of them so long that you’ve figured out what the conclusion of the scene will be long before it takes place. This is a terrible flaw. If there’s anything that films from the Golden Age of Hong Kong tend to do well, it’s a characteristic blistering pace and palpable energy. Wong Gam-Din also flubs Cat’s final confrontation with Yip Huan. Yip Huan has just done something truly horrible (involving an awesome fire stunt) to one of Cat’s friends, but Wong Gam-Din fails to milk the response properly. It’s completely unsatisfying.
As an added irritant, the subtitles are absolutely awful. Probably a good 50% of the dialog isn’t translated at all, with the rest being translated poorly, all presented in white type which frequently is illegible against light backgrounds.
The screenwriters and director Wong Gam-Din take a good premise and terrific actors and completely screw it up. The Most Wanted should have been a classic. Instead, it’s barely watchable.
Note: From checking out the Hong Kong Movie Database, I find out that director Wong Gam-Din is a Category III hack who hasn’t made one decent film. Figures.
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