The A-Team

The A-Team may very well be summer 2010's most pleasant surprise. It's a balls-to the-walls action flick that owes more to 1980s action movies than it does to the '80s TV series that it's adapted from. The film captures the spirit of the show and the camaraderie among its titular quartet while jettisoning much of the campy humor and ramping up the action to almost absurd levels (a tank falls out of a plane for Pete's sake!). Indeed, there's an action set-piece seemingly every 15 minutes, and yet the movie isn't so breathlessly paced as to forget to pause to have some quieter moments (even if it's just banter).

We don't know much about who these guys were before they met each other save for B.A., the only one with a bit of backstory (enough to explain where his mohawk came from). We know Hannibal was in Desert Storm and that he and Face have been brothers-in-arms longer than the rest of the team, but otherwise these guys seem to live in the moment moving from one mission to the next until their military careers (and their sense of identity) are stripped from them. Performance-wise, the four main actors for the most part do a fine job in paying homage to their small screen predecessors even as they attempt to make these beloved characters their own.
review by IGN

Bad Blood (2010)

The film kicks off in fine, action packed style with Tung Luen Shun gang boss Lok Cheung On (Eddie Cheung) being caught during a botched counterfeit money job in Mainland China, and then summarily executed. This leaves a power vacuum for the gang back in Hong Kong, with the oddly named but ambitious Funky (Simon Yam) being first in line to step up and lead the family. However, many others are also vying for position, including Lok’s naïve son (Chris Lai), recently returned from the US, his seemingly quiet and obedient daughter Audrey (Bernice Liu), and Calf, a young man with a disfiguring birthmark on his face and a massive chip on his shoulder – not to mention Lok’s many wives, mistresses and other triad henchmen. It soon becomes clear that one of them is only too willing to kill for the job, as cast members start dropping like flies, forcing the others to try and figure out who the murder is before they find their own throats cut.

There’s no denying that, by traditional cinematic standards, “Bad Blood” is a bit of a mess. Law has never been much of a storyteller, showing a strange predilection for alternately ignoring his characters and then spending far too much time focusing on their more mundane activities. Despite its basic high concept premise of being a triad murders whodunit, the plot has a real tendency to go off on odd and pointless tangents, though thankfully less so than in other recent Law efforts such as “Womb Ghosts”. The good news is that all of this actually works well to make “Bad Blood” extremely entertaining, if perhaps not for the intended reasons. With all of the cast playing strange, larger than life and not quite believable cartoon figures, their infighting and scheming makes for some wonderfully hysterical melodrama, most of which is all the funnier for being played straight. Once the identity of the assassin is revealed, wisely quite early on in the proceedings, things get even better, with some top notch ruthlessness and wacky murders. Here, Law shows his usual taste for randomness, with characters being abruptly dispatched with no thought to generating tension, something which also makes for some unexpected, laugh out loud moments.
Dennis Law (director) / Dennis Law (screenplay)
CAST: Wai-Man Chan … Zen
Pinky Cheung … Lucy / The Seventh Wife
Siu-Fai Cheung … Andy
Luxia Jiang … Dumby
Suet Lam … Peter Wong
Bernice Liu … Audrey
Ken Lo … Hung
Andy On … Calf
Xin Xin Xiong … Kong
Simon Yam … Funky