A squad of four police officers on an unwanted drug assignment are staking out a "logistics company". When the criminals become suspicious, they buy the restaurant they've been using for its toilet as a cover.... and are a runaway success as a restaurant in this startlingly gritty and funny cop comedy.
Most of the reason I find it so funny is I find its earnest, hapless and ultimately barely successful heroes so much like characters out of one of my favorite comic author's mind: Donald Westlake. Despite his having worked in Hollywood, few of his comic novels, some of them very cinematic, were ever successfully transferred to the screen, either because they decided to cast Robert Redford as a hapless New York schmuck (THE HOT ROCK), or they tried to shoot it on the cheap. Two of his screenplays became fine movies: Stephen Frear's neo-noir THE GRIFTERS and a personal favorite, HOT STUFF, about some cops who take over a fencing operation to run a massive sting.
Although Xinyun Li, the director of this movie, has her cops and bad guys a lot more competent than Westlake liked on the pages of his books, they are just as subject to the problems of not thinking things through and of not seeing their opportunities that us mortal human beings are likely to.... except, of course, when we're the audience, and the camera is pointing at the bad guy, we get to see who he is and howl at how dumb the cop is.... and when the bad guy lets the cop pull a triple cross on him, we howl in laughter again.
It's good to know that the people in charge can foul up, just the same as us. It makes us like them better. And it's also good to know that at least in movies like this, they're the good guys and get the bad guys.
