Heroic Duo 双雄

Tough police detective Ken Li (Ekin Cheng) finds himself up against a most unusual case – his colleague and friend broke into the station at night and set fire to a safe containing vital evidence, and then shot himself during questioning. Much points to the unfortunate man having committed the crime against his will, under the influence of hypnosis, and to shed light on the situation, Ken turns for help to an experienced hypnotist (Leon Lai) who is currently in prison.

Impressions: Benny Chan's action films always seem torn by internal contradictions. On the one hand, they are almost always powerful actioners with superbly shot gunfights and brawls, but on the other — a total "lights out" when it comes to drama. Heroism inflated to the point of absurdity, overwrought music, sentimentality sugared into a sticky and utterly unpalatable syrup, combined with an invariably drawn-out finale full of slow motion — that is the rough formula for practically any Benny Chan action film, and Heroic Duo is no exception in this regard. You'd think the fashion for this kind of cinema died out some five years ago, but no — here it is, alive and breathing deeply.

First and foremost, among the contradictions already mentioned, the plot — contrived to the extreme — jumps out at you. I know little about hypnotists, but it seems to me that a) Leon Lai doesn't look like a hypnotist even remotely, and b) even the most advanced virtuosos of the craft can't put a man into a trance in a couple of minutes. On top of all that, Leon Lai's character doesn't just master hypnotism — he slips out of handcuffs with ease and generally does everything short of walking through walls — a regular Harry Potter! Since many of the plot turns rest on this sorcerer's abilities, after a while the events lose all plausibility whatsoever. Francis Ng doesn't lend them any realism either — he plays the film's chief villain so eccentrically that he could easily have settled into some Batman or other, right alongside the Joker and the Penguin.

Ekin Cheng and the other cops, on the other hand, are already from our world. They swear at each other, get into fights time and again, and permanently exist in a state of extreme fury at the whole wide world. Well, yes — quite a lot like law enforcement officers. Ekin Cheng acts surprisingly well, though I suspect that impression came mostly from comparison with the indistinct and colorless Leon Lai — like a true hypnotist, he never changes his facial expression throughout the film and reacts to any external irritant like a true hero — with complete indifference, whether it's the battered body of his girlfriend or the hateful face of her tormentor.

The action, though, is very good — both the "bullet-whistling" kind and the "leg-swinging" kind. It never comes to full-fledged hand-to-hand duels, but a few short scuffles along the way look quite convincing. The finale, admittedly, is mercilessly "smeared" by the pathos already mentioned above, but apart from the last fifteen minutes Heroic Duo is perfectly watchable and even to some degree engaging — after all, it's very professionally made. You can't drink away craftsmanship! There is, admittedly, another sensible proverb — "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." That fits too.