Right, well I figured that a Vietnamese action movie with superhero elements might be a good way to spend 113 minutes. And thus I opted to sit down and watch "Lôi Báo" here in 2023, without ever having heard about it actually. I stumbled upon it, and the synopsis seemed interesting enough, plus the fact that it was an Asian movie that I hadn't already seen was sufficient to make me give the movie a chance.
And I managed to endure a mind-numbing 77 minutes of this heap of rubbish from writers Doan Nhat Nam, Kay Nguyen and Victor Vu before I gave up. Wow, talk about a bland script and even worse characters. The narrative in the movie was slow paced, and the fact that the writers tried to spruce it up with some body switching just didn't help, because there was no drive behind the movie. Everything that transpired on the screen was just monotonous and bland.
Of course, with my limited exposure to Vietnamese cinema, then I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble here. But they were struggling, oh boy were they struggling. They had nothing wholesome to work with in terms of script and characters. Especially the characters, they were so flat and one-dimensional that I simply didn't care one bit about any of them.
There were a couple of fair enough fight scenes and some action scenes in the 77 minutes that I endured, but it just simply wasn't enough to sustain the movie. And I have to say that I am not a fan of Parkour, which was done in an abundance in this movie.
"Lôi Báo" is a movie that came and went without leaving even the slightest of ripples on the pond. The movie will be shelved here, and I will never return to attempt watching the rest of the 113 minutes. And this is hardly a movie that I would recommend to fans of the Asian action cinema.
My rating of director Victor Vu's 2017 action movie "Lôi Báo" lands on a very generous three out of ten stars.
