Movie Review: Firestorm/風暴

An American rifle? How unpatriotic!Firestorm/風暴 is a story about a by-the-book police officer who wants to catch a criminal and the lengths (and depths) he will go to in order to catch him.

Well, that’s the story in the beginning.

By the end of the movie none of that applies.

And nothing makes sense.

Everything the film started with is gone.

Everything the film ends with feels disconnected from… anything.

Gordon Lam Ka Tung is an ex-con who must decide between his gang and his girlfriend.

If this were prison, they’d both be facing the same way.

Philip Keung Ho Man is a snitch whose daughter is autistic.

“Why are you touching her?”

 Andy Lau is her Godfather.

And a cop.

Don’t ask me why.

Firestorm/風暴 never really explains.

It explains why Andy Lau is friends with Gordon Lam; they were schoolmates.

Nobody bats an eye when cops are friends with the very people in a case they’re working.

Especially cops who are bulletproof and have deadly accuracy shooting assault rifles from the hip.

“Watch the b@lls!”

To be fair, almost none of this movie is logical.

Two people fall half a dozen stories off a roof, only to land on a metal frame suspended between laundry racks.

Yeah, that could happen.

And what do they do?

They get up and fight.

On this amazingly sturdy thing that just fell there by chance.

Then they fall.

Another half dozen stories.

Then they dust themselves off and keep going.

F@#$ a bunch of gravity.

In fairness, at times I got caught up in the story.

There are a few noteworthy moments, and I was sincerely shocked by at least one of them.

“Take the milk powder!”

The original premise of the film was really interesting.

There were a lot of good ideas in Firestorm/風暴.

Unfortunately, they never get followed through.

Andy Lau stars inStigmata 2: Jesus is Historically Chinese.

Plot points begin, and they… fade away.

New plots begin.

Well, they arrive.

Saying they begin implies that there is explanation and detail.

There isn’t.

It’s unfortunate, because there are some good performances.

Phat Chan (r) as a soup-fetching cop was sincerely great.

But the movie hamstrings these performances with awful scrīptwriting.

And bad CGI.

And a lot of pointless stuff with no reason for being there.

I was really confused by this movie.

All I ended up taking from it was the idea that many things are pointless, that life is just a span of time spent in some nihilistic limbo.

Shouldn’t there be a chess set?

Which is fine, except that you can’t really make a nihilistic movie about nihilism; a movie about pointlessness still has to make a point.

And Firestorm/風暴 doesn’t.

It isn’t the worst Andy Lau movie of 2013. That would be Switch.

But Firestorm/風暴 is probably the second worst.

All I’m saying is that Andy Lau is lucky Lan Kwai Fong 3 comes out next week.