Future Cops 超级学校霸王

The year is 2043. The trial of the dangerous criminal General (Ken Lo) is about to begin, and he sends his three henchmen, led by the hero Ekin Cheng, 50 years back in time so that they can kill the judge who will preside over the case. But three tough cops (Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung and Simon Yam) follow them into the past, where they must now find and protect the future judge, who in 1993 is still in school and suffering the bullying of a local thug (Andy Hui). Naturally, love is not left out of it either, as Jacky Cheung, having installed himself at the school as a teacher, falls for the school beauty (Winnie Lau), while Andy Lau falls for the sister of their charge (Chingmy Yau).

Impressions: Well, it's certainly not the most perfect film, that's for sure. Wong Jing often overdoes the comedy in his films (especially when he's directing), and with the rambunctious script of Future Cops in particular, he doesn't always manage to keep it under control — at times the action simply slips out of his hands and drifts off into "free sailing" (or more accurately, a wild gallop). There's so much comedy here that Future Cops could rightly claim the title of "the film with the highest density of jokes per square centimeter of celluloid." The other thing is that this comedy is, in places, far from the best quality.

At times it's funny (for instance, at the beginning, in 2043, we're shown a poster for yet another installment of "Back to School," in which an already gray-haired Stephen Chow once again goes undercover at that educational institution), but quite often Jing "overdoes it." He could easily be called the "most derivative" filmmaker in Hong Kong, or to put it more precisely... they steal... Into every one of his films he stuffs about a dozen old jokes and gags which, in his opinion, worked before, so they'll work now. Again, not always — watching a parody of Ghost when you've already seen it done brilliantly in All's Well, Ends Well isn't particularly amusing. On top of that, the characters here are completely unhinged. Expect utterly unrestrained jokes that have no idea when to stop and keep bombarding you with information until you switch off the film in horror.

Sitting through an hour and a half of this is genuinely hard — the characters fool around, fall down, crack stupid jokes, and generally behave not much more intelligently than trained monkeys. If you can accept this style (or if you even enjoy it), consider yourself lucky with this film. For my part, I hardly got the same pleasure from it as, say, from Stephen Chow's parodies or Eagle Shooting Heroes — I did laugh heartily a few times, but the flat jokes following in a dense stream after the good ones leave no time to catch your breath.

As you probably already know, Future Cops was made using characters from the video game Street Fighter (they are the main protagonists). I spent quite a few hours playing it back in the day, and seeing this kind of impersonation of those characters was, at the very least, an amusing experience for me. Fun. But don't expect any fights — although the action was staged by Ching Siu-Tung, there's practically none here. Mostly it's jumping, energy-blast shooting, flying, and sped-up footage. If you've seen City Hunter with Jackie Chan and remember the scene where he fights Gary Daniels after bumping into a Street Fighter arcade machine, then you'll have a rough idea of what Future Cops is like in that regard. Yes, that's right — and like that for the entire hour and a half.

Of course, whatever I say, it's absolutely impossible to resist such a star-studded cast! Jacky Cheung and Chingmy Yau have a blast throughout, and besides them, even the always-serious Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng try to step a little out of their "star" images, just to let their audience relax with their film. Well, that's how it turns out — a light, undemanding film, not always as funny as it should be, but it's very dynamic and simply charged with positive energy.