Qi bai wan yuan da jie an

I caught this movie on TV, and in the opening credits, with all the Chinese names, I thought, "Ooh, excellent, a Chinese martial-arts movie."

And, yes, it is a Chinese martial-arts movie, but with an added twist - it's filmed in Rome! The grandson of the president of a petroleum company is kidnapped, and the kidnappers want 10 million dollars worth of ransom money. The boy's grandfather wants his grandson back, but he doesn't want to pay up. So, he hires detectives to get the boy back.

Three Western detectives have a go at it - and fail miserably, with comedy. After the third fails, they go have a meal at a Chinese restaurant, lamenting at how they failed to get the boy back. Then suddenly they see two of the young waiters playfully throwing lethal-looking martial arts moves at each other, and sign the elder one up to "make some money" - in other words, get the boy back before his ear gets cut off.

The movie is excellent, with action and comedy thrown in together very well. But I would have liked the Western actors' speech to have been retained with subtitles, rather than dubbed over in Cantonese.

Excellent, but not necessarily mind-blowingly terrific. Quite worth my time.