Invisible Target: Its all about Wu Jing...

Friday night I went to see 'Invisible Target' at the M0S theater.

In case you don't know, this is the Benny Chan directed police action movie starring Shawn Yue, Nicolas Tse and Jaycee Chan.  The three of them are cops who team up in their fight to catch a gang of vicious criminals.  Each of them does a pretty decent job, and there are some good stunts in the film (Benny Chan has filmed many films w/ Jackie Chan and uses his JC Stunt Team for this movie),  but the real stand out in this film is Wu Jing (former Beijing Wushu Team member, who broke out in HK cinema with 2005's 'SPL').

The movie is GOOD but not great,  there are some annoying small things that keep it from being more than just a summer popcorn flick...  The plot seems to suffer from some bad cuts or something, things just kind of jump around at points and there's an entire sub-plot about Jaycee's character's dead brother (with surprise cameo photo) that is just referred to but never shown...  maybe they're saving it for a prequel?  :-P

The stunts are great in some places,  lots of people getting thrown off balconies and smashing windows, etc  but then there are also a lot of turkeys...  particularly the ones where the actors are suspended by wires.... note to Benny Chan:  Just because you can erase the wires digitally doesn't mean its not obviously a fake shot using wires!

Phil Ng has a small role as an arms smuggler that Nicolas chases down through the streets of Sheung Wan,  but i'm still not exactly sure what his character was doing, since the scrīpt didn't exactly explain much of it... (at least not via the English subs).

A lot of people are curious about Jaycee (whether he'll be following in his father's footsteps, etc...)  He does a good job in the film, and his action scenes are good too. But I think his character was written pretty badly in the scrīpt...  he is like the most EMO police officer every! I think he cries like 3 or 4 times in the movie...  i'm not sure if they wanted a balance to the macho super-cop type characters played by Shawn and Nicolas or what,  but its just strange.

Gasoline fire scene was pretty impressive actually,  I thought it was all CG until I saw the blooper real during the credits.

But as i said, the real impressive thing about this movie is Wu Jing.  Its great to see him take on a heavy role and be a complete bad-ass.  He looks like he put on a bit of weight for this movie, but thats fine, it fits the character well:

He spends most of the movie running around in black trench coats...

Thats him stomping on two of the three lead actors.

I'll give it a 6/10.  Good popcorn flick, but I like a nice clear plot...   

(ps - apologies to all the people I stole stills from!)