Ulterior Motive is a fun action/mystery Chinese movie that goes easy on the eye, is fast paced, and is more than a little overstuffed.
We have here some of the I-think-I-have-seen-you-a-hundred-times- before faces of the Hong Kong or Chinese movie industry: Simon Yam, Gordon Lam, Archie Kao... in a quite simple, but we are going to make it complicated, plot:
The husband and daughter of Ye Shuang (Qin Lan), the daughter of very very rich man Ye Cheng (Simon Yam), are kidnapped, and the police put Yao Jie (Gordon Lam) to the case. Is it simple, right? Well, for starters, monsieur Yao Jie is the ex-boyfriend of Ye Shuang, and they broke up before he went to America to study. And the kidnapping case seems related to a case that happened more than twenty years ago, and... Well, this is just the start of surprise after surprise after surprise, till you will be wondering what was all about.
Luckily for us Arthur Wong does a nice job of keeping everything more or less clear, so we won't get lost in all the information that is condensed in the hour and a half that the movies lasts. Sometimes the action, or some moments are done in a little heavy-handed way (unnecessary slow motions, for example), but in general the action is pretty nicely directed. The actors do a nice job, with the always reliable Simon Yam keeping it toned down this time, maybe so we can enjoy Gordon Lam's eyebrows movements, as he hams it up a little bit.
The plot, as I said before, is convoluted, and in the end, there are a couple too many twists, which may make some viewers lost interest, as it is more than possible than someone will raise their hands to heaven and say: really?
With all of this, maybe I shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did, especially because the incongruities pile on each other, but between the cinematography, the actors good work and the steady hand of its director, Ulterior Motive ends up being harmless fun.
