Movie Review: Triple Tap/枪王之王

Derek Yee directed this sequel to his earlier film Double Tap.

These terms are used by people who are familiar with firearms; a double tap means, in simple terms, to shoot twice.

Britain’s Special Air Service, for instance, are all quite frighteningly adept at putting two pistol shots into a target’s head while shooting from the hip (i.e. without aiming). This is called a ‘double tap.’ It is considered the most effective manner of rendering an enemy harmless. It also renders them quite irretrievably dead. But then you don’t really use elite soldiers to arrest people, do you?

**Because of my rather voracious and, to borrow an adjective usually placed upon me in a different area, wantonreading habits, I happen to know a fair amount about shooting, ballistics, and related subjects.

Remember, it’s because I read a lot.**

That knowledge is one reason I found Triple Tap/枪王之王 to be quite exasperatingly bad.

This review will go from bad to good, because I know from my experience teaching that criticisms are best ordered thus.

The reasons for this may also be self-evident in that some of the characters in the film are portrayed by not only members but progenitors of this website. And, in fairness, I have no qualms with their performances. They are relatively blameless.

Considering Derek Yee wrote and directed Triple Tap/枪王之王 , let’s make him the target (!) of my recriminations.

This film meanders narcotically along (a job usually reserved for the reviewer) until it manages to stumble into a plot line. I spent more than the first third of the film waiting for the story to begin.

I was, for the record, quite free of cough syrup or other judgment/thought-impairing substances, much to my eternal regret.

Maybe I read too much, or I’m over-educated.

Or I’m just a whiny, petulant @sshole.

Or maybe I have a hard time watching people make profoundly illogical and idiotic mistakes that no real-life person would.

Maybe I find retrospective narrative gymnastics and oh-so-convenient reveals to be cheap attempts to salvage an unworkable mess of a story.

Either way, Triple Tap/枪王之王 ‘s putative narrative is farcical at best and ludicrous at work.

Digression: If you read my reviews, even at my mostMurderer -ously (!) scathing, I still refuse to spoil the films I despoil. That rule still holds, if only to allow me some scrap of recourse when, as must someday happen, I am face-to-face with a director whose work I have flogged like the dumb rented ox it is. End of digression.

Not even a person as dumb as Chapman To can so brilliantly act can shoot a person through the sternum, having the bullet exit “below the left armpit”, and “hit no major organs.”

That’s all there is in your f@#$ing chest cavity, you insufferable dullard; two lungs and a heart. But who needs those?

Another repository of apparently disposable organs is  the skull, which would have been a pretty good place to shoot them if you wanted to kill them.

The target is in a coma, in a hospital, connected to a lot of life-support equipment, so firearms are obviously the only intelligent, silent, untraceable means of dispatching them.

The criminals are f@#$ing brilliant…

So yes, Triple Tap/枪王之王 ‘s narrative is dumb enough to lose a debate with that coma patient (or the flowers next to his bed). I could exhaustively pummel the issue, but frankly its not worth it.

The acting in the film, however, iscertainly worth mentioning if only because it makes me feel so bad to see it wasted on such execrable scriptwriting.

Daniel Wu, Louis Koo, Chapman To and Andrew Lin are all good in their roles, convincing and entertaining enough that I predict the film will do well at least locally.

I honestly have no qualms with them or their performances. In fact, most everyone in the film acts well.

Special sympathy goes to Andrew Lin and Li Bing Bing, who get the Chinese Ventriloquism Treatment. It’s hard to sound convincing in someone else’s voice, but their visual acting is certainly good enough.

The rest of my sympathy is reserved for whatever unfortunate souls end up watching this film.