Pom Pom and Hot Hot 神枪手与咖喱鸡

Two best friends on the police force (Jacky Cheung and Stephen Tung) are handed a dangerous assignment – to find whoever killed a major crime boss. Apparently one of the dead man's own men, who took his place after the boss's death, is involved, but getting close to the gangster won't be easy. The situation is complicated further by the relatives of one of the friends, who have come from the mainland to stay with him…

Despite the coveted "Pom Pom" in the title (what does it even mean?), this film has nothing to do with the Pom Pom tetralogy popular in the 1980s, which, incidentally, was launched by none other than Joe Cheung himself (he directed the first picture and then "handed off" the series to other filmmakers). But if you ignore the formal markers, the films have a great deal in common — this too is a buddy movie that mixes humor, romance and action. And its protagonists are police detectives conducting an investigation using highly extravagant methods.

Eight years passed between Pom Pom and this film, and those years, on the one hand, stripped the plot of its charming 1980s spontaneity, and on the other, added a toughness to the action bordering on brutality, more typical of the "hard-boiled" 1990s. In one of the first scenes, our heroes, fleeing from gangsters, run straight into a party, where their pursuers start blasting left and right, killing innocent civilians. Flashy? Perhaps. But in real life, you'd want to strangle cops like these with your bare hands for putting blameless people in the line of fire. In general, people die easily in Pom Pom and Hot Hot — for instance, one of the informants, played by Zebra Pang, agrees to lead the partners to his boss when they threaten to frame him and throw him behind bars. He says he'll surely be killed for it, but he does it anyway — and of course, quite matter-of-factly takes the first bullet in the shootout. Our heroes, it seems, don't even notice the "loss of a comrade."

But if you close your eyes to these glaring flaws, you get one of the best action comedies of its time — genuinely funny, categorically never boring, and with excellently staged and highly inventive action. The final shootout between the chief villain's henchman (Austin Wai) and the boss of the main characters (Lam Ching-Ying) will be remembered for a long time — both rivals are experienced marksmen, and although, in cinematic tradition, one sniper somehow can't hit another sniper, this scene is watched with your mouth hanging open.