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 ou certainly wouldn't mistake Dante Lam's
"Heat Team" to be anything of substance. It's basically too much
style-over-everything, with a number of choice scenes just screaming,
"Pay attention, this is a real cool camera shot here!" As a
result, you'll never take "Heat Team" seriously, especially in
light of the very lightweight script everyone's working from.
"Heat Team" is a Buddy Cop Movie in the
vein of, well, all Buddy Cop Movies since the dawn of cinema. Meaning, of
course, that when straight-laced cop YT (Aaron Kwok) meets loose cannon KC
(Eason Chan) they immediately develop a dislike for one another. But by a
quirk of Movie Coincidence, they also happen to be the two best cops on
the force, thus they're assigned to work together on a big case. And, as
you might have already guessed, by movie's end the two have developed
enough trust and admiration for one another that they're willing to trust
each other with their lives, et cetera.
Folks, it's a simple Buddy Cop Movie. It follows all
the standard formulas. And it also leads me to my favorite line when
critiquing formulaic films like this: "It is what it is."
Directed by Dante Lam, a man who has had, to put it
mildly, a rather strange career filled with highs ("Beast
Cops" and "Option
Zero") and lows ("The
Twins Effect"), "Heat Team" would probably fit
somewhere between "Twins" for its inability to be more than
cheap flash and "Zero" based on the strength of one -- count'em,
one -- action sequence. This action sequence comes near the
beginning, with KC and YT converging on an (apparently) abandoned strip of
freeway where they engage in a firefight with heavily armed jewel thieves.
The rest of the film has gunfights, but they're of much smaller scale than
the freeway scene. Also, the ending is strangely anti-climactic and
uninteresting.
"Heat Team" works best when its script is
pulling out unsuspecting gags out of its bag. One of the film's more
successful jokes involve Aaron Kwok's hardboiled cop, who is revealed to
be painfully clueless around women. His ex-girlfriend keeps coming back to
him so he can call up her recent lover and threaten him with police
violence because he (the lover) was mean to her. And later, a female thief
gets in some choice shots at our hero, drawing at least one pint of blood
when all is said and done. Romeo this guy ain't.
On the flip side is Eason Chan, a womanizing playboy
who women nevertheless finds inexplicably irresistible. While Chan himself
is not the most handsome man in the world, as he confides to YT, it's his
lips that draw the chicks in. Heck, even men can't resist his lips!
Predictably, when the boys are forced to work under the authority of a
third top cop played by Yumiko Cheng, one of them ends up in a love-hate
relationship with her. Not that it really matters, because like the jewel
thieves, Cheng's character seems to show up whenever the script loses
interest in YT and KC's confrontations.
Speaking of which, "Heat Team" executes its
police angle quite poorly, which may be the result of three-fourths of the
film being spent on something other than the jewel thief case. Needless to
say, important plot points sort of just shows up whenever something needs
to happen. This is doubly irritating because the jewel thief's female
accomplice figures very prominently into the storyline toward the end. And
again, it's all so poorly carried out that it makes you wonder why they
bothered putting it into the script in the first place. How bad is it? I
couldn't even tell you the female accomplice's name.
"Heat Team" works mostly as a comedy
because things never devolve into a series of bathroom humor slapstick.
For the most part the comedy seems mature, at least by Hong Kong comedy
standards. As an action film, the freeway scene is probably the movie's
only successful action sequence, with the rest being either mediocre or
just too impossibly silly to count. In any case, director Dante Lam seems
more concern with getting in as many creative camera shots as possible. He
certainly achieves that, if not much else.
When all is said and done, I suppose "Heat
Team" is a breezy enough way to lose 95 minutes of free time. It's
not the worst of the bunch, but you can't help but think that it could
have been much better if the comedy was jettisoned completely and the
whole thing was played with a straight face. Dante Lam is no Johnnie To, of
course, but there seems to be an inkling of a serious, gritty crime film
in "Heat Team" that was never taken, well, seriously.
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