Hong Kong 97

It's a tragedy to see Albert Pyun slumming it with this sort of direct-to-video car crash, Hong Kong 97 is far from his finest hour, a shame given the potential of the story and setting is a winner. Robert Patrick takes the lead alongside a bunch of B-movie frequenters, including Andrew Divoff, Brion James and Tim Thomerson, they do what they can with the rather poor, cliched script but even then their natural chemistry can't lift what's fundamentally shoddy writing. Pyun's direction is alright but his action scenes rely too much on choppy slow-motion, lacklustre gunfights and poor staging, I don't think even a better quality of print would be able to save these. I can give some credit to Michael McCarty's score which does a decent job of matching the mood and atmosphere of the setting but that's about it. While there's a bit of B-movie fondness to be found with Hong Kong 97, it doesn't mark many of its contributor's finest hours and is probably best left forgotten for the most part; just stick to the AVGN video.

"Hong Kong '97" is one of those many "hitmen-with-a-conscience" flicks. The T-1000 himself Robert Patrick plays a laconic assassin named Cameron, who succeeds in killing a Chinese diplomat just on the eve of the day Hong Kong becomes part of China from the U.K. The killing results in trouble for Cameron, as guys with itchy trigger-fingers try to pump lead into our "hero", his girlfriend, and his buddy (played by Brion James, who finally portrays a good guy!) Though visually striking, "Hong Kong 97" is a pretty dense film, with an incoherent plot and bad dialogue. Patrick tries hard, but his charming good lucks can't really save this film from falling down a well of despair!

We watched one of those rare movies the other night that was so bad, it actually was good.

Improbability piled on top of unlikelihood layered over with banality and stupefying inconsequence.

Other than that, it was quite good.

The first "humping scene" was one minute and ten seconds in. (We have a little pool every time we watch a movie. Usually if you choose any time within the first twenty minutes, you have a chance.) Why stick with it, why not scrap the tape and use it to record Debbie Travis.

Because this movie boggled the mind. Just when you said "it can't get any worse" it did.

But the definitively awful thing about it was the amount of gunplay.

Hi…I don't like your necktie…take that…blam blam.

In one memorable scene, the leading man ---HEY, LOOK AT ME, I'M DOING A BAD IMPRESSION OF PIERCE BROSNAN --- naked and in bed with an equally naked lady (well, I doubt she was much of a "lady") is interrupted by three gunmen.

He rises from the bed, a gun in each hand, which he uses to dispatch the bad guys. BLAM BLAM WHANG ZING BANG Actually, if they were trying to kill this character, they would have been GOOD guys.

But we continue to agonize over our handgun problem.

The reasons for it are pretty obvious when you watch a movie like this

My favorite part was the people shoots some assassinations and the ending scene.

This film is not an academy award winning film, but I am tired of people putting it down such as other films by Robert Patrick. I rented this when it first came out and I did not think much of it, along with Decoy and other Patrick films before his x-files years. Yet what I have come to realize is that these films capture a time and feeling which we just don't see anymore. B-films have become no-talent video filmed crap movies that are as bad as anything you might have seen on MST3K more then a decade ago. Looking back on these films such as Hong Kong 97 makes me wish that independent film companies still gave financial backing to these visions. Is this movie bad? No! Can it be better? Yes. Is it worth watching? Certainly!