Movie Review: The Constable/衝鋒戰警

Dennis Law is a property developer who has a lot of money.

He likes to direct movies, so when he does, he doesn’t have to take box office returns into consideration as much as others.

This means his films are often different from other local movies, and often don’t fit the rules for distribution in China; his vampires and ghosts are really vampires and ghosts.

His new movie, The Constable/衝鋒戰警, stars Simon Yam as a police officer named Lam Kwok Kuen.

He is also a single parent with a son, Lam Wing Chung, played by Li Jinjiang .

The son has a heart problem and suffers from Downs syndrome.

Officer Lam works in Kowloon City, but lives in Shenzen.

He commutes every day.

A young woman named Lin Tsui Yan, played by Niu Mengmeng, takes care of the son.

This makes her boyfriend, played by Sam Lee, jealous.

“Wait… was it… fish… or flowers?”

And that’s just the first 15 minutes of the movie!

These plot developments are stuffed in between vignettes that show us in the most overstated, didactic way what a righteous cop and wonderful father Yam’s character is.

The opening of the film shows him walking down a street at night.

A young woman with very tight clothes is accosted by a trio of young men in white shirts, white pants, black leather jackets and… sunglasses.

At night.

Super Cop to the rescue!

He subdues the perpetrators until the merely human police arrive, which happens conveniently just as he knocks out the last bad guy.

In an American cop movie, the bimbo would thank him in a very pubic manner.

But Officer Lam is righteous, and he eats no hairy crab.

So to speak.

In a later brawl, he fights six men who attack him with knives.

In a public toilet.

Not only does he defeat then, he doesn’t even cut any of them!

Because he is righteous!

The Constable/衝鋒戰警 plays like an after-school special or a propaganda movie.

It’s so conscientiously innocuous, it’s weird.

It’s almost like a Category I movie made by the government to promote the police force.

And to be honest, it’s actually good enough, in its own weird way, that I can’t really get mad at it.

I’m not really sure why.

It’s not well-made, the story is so predictable it’s silly, and like I said, it’s so strait-laced you wonder how the actors kept a straight face saying these lines.

But that’s the best and worst part of the movie all rolled into one.

One of the bad things about this movie is that there is some good acting in it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s bad acting too, I’m just saying.

But Simon Yam makes you believe in his character.

He overacts in this movie.

What I mean is, he acts more, and better, than this movie deserves.

He makes it impossible to ridicule the movie the way it really ought to be.

Wang Ziyi is good too, at least sometimes. He plays the young cop who has yet to find his backbone, both professionally and emotionally.

He has a crush on one of his colleagues, played by Maggie Li, but she wants a man and not a boy.

Maggie Shiu plays a police officer.

Which seems to be something stipulated in the Basic Law.

But I don’t care. I like Maggie Shiu, and she’s easy to watch.

Especially when she’s holding a shotgun.

So is Lam Suet, who is not only funny, but also gets to do an action scene in an elevator fighting a woman.

I hope that woman got paid really well.

Is The Constable good? No.

Does it suck? No.

I can’t really figure it out myself, but there’s something sincere about this movie that hating on it just seems wrong.

It really plays like a propaganda movie, but it is entertaining, and there is at least one really good Dennis Law surprise in it that makes it worth watching.

The Constable/衝鋒戰警 is good for a laugh if not much else.

And really, that’s all we can reasonably expect from Dennis Law.