Let's Go! 保卫战队之出动喇！朋友！

Siu Sheung (Juno Mak) is just an ordinary kid from a poor neighborhood, but he has one talent — he knows how to fight. That's what gets him noticed by the bodyguards of a wealthy businessman, Mr. Ho Yu (Jimmy Wang Yu), who invite him to join their ranks. Ho Yu tasks Sheung with keeping an eye on his restless daughter Annie (Stephy Tang), but while Sheung is trying to keep up with her, a full-scale showdown erupts in his boss's mansion — the bodyguards, tired of always being at everyone's beck and call, turn against their master. Now Sheung must protect Annie and settle the score with the head bodyguard, Shing (Gordon Lam), the man who cost him his arm.

Nostalgia always sells, and these days there's no surer way to win over Hong Kong audiences than with a good dose of it — the mainland can make anything it likes, but it can't remind the colony's natives of their own childhoods. Two years ago this approach won acclaim for the project Gallants, whose makers tried to recapture the spirit of old kung fu actioners, and the director and screenwriter of Let's Go!, Wong Ching-Po, draws on a different source of nostalgia — Japanese TV series about interplanetary defenders of Earth and the giant robots they piloted.

Since that subject isn't all that close to us (though who among us didn't watch Macross 1 as a kid?), we won't get to wallow in nostalgia, and we'll have to watch the film "as is," with no allowance for fond memories. And the spectacle that emerges isn't very appealing. If only because the film splits sharply in two — the first half is a thoroughly traditional, down-to-earth crime drama, at times reminiscent of Johnnie To's The Exiled (it feels as though Wong Ching-Po borrowed a few visual tricks from his "elder brother" too), while the second, after a painfully long 20-minute interlude stuffed with all the usual agonizing over honor, duty and other such high-flown nonsense, turns into a hypertrophied, exaggerated comic-book affair in which the heroes run around in impenetrable suits (bullets and knives alike can't touch them) and send a car spinning with a single punch. The contrast is so stark that all you can do is throw up your hands — why?

And fine, if the second, "comic-book" half could offer its audience something unusual and striking — but no, there's no particularly subtle humor here, no mind-blowing special effects, no jaw-dropping action. On the contrary, everything is so mediocre you could even nod off. And Juno Mak, with all due respect, barely passes as a screen fighter — he doesn't even move like a fighter (just watch him run!), so the fights are wire-assisted, choppy and smeared by the shaky camera and muddled editing. Given that the nostalgic heartstring misses its target here, the whole film misses its target too. Still, it's nice to see that Hong Kong keeps reviving its kung fu-era classics — here, alongside the now-familiar Ken Lo and Chin Siu-Ho, we get Jimmy Wang Yu, Hon Kwok-Choi, Wong Chung, Chung Fat and Billy Ching.