Fei chang jing cha

MAGNIFICENT TEAM is an offbeat Hong Kong crime thriller made late in the 1990s. It has that same youthful vibrancy about it that marks the genre at the tail-end of the millennium, and although heavily stylised it's not as dated as comparable fare from Hollywood. The story, which follows a new police squad as it hunts down a violent gang of robbers, is reasonable enough and works well when it follows the police procedural structure in the first half. However, the second involves a rather boring sub-plot with Francis Ng's character, and I ended up finding it quite tiresome, although there's some action at the climax.