Another Meltdown (1998)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Alex Law and Roy Sze To
Directed by Allun Lam
Starring Chiu Man-Cheuk, Shu Qi, Andrew Lin, and Ken Wong

Features:

• Photo gallery
• Trailers

Released by: Columbia Tristar
Region: 1
Rating: R
Anamorphic: Yes.

My Advice: Avoid it.

Yim Dong/Arthur (Man-Cheuk) is an earnest young Chinese cop whose willingness to go beyond regulations during a plane hijacking situation gets him in big bad trouble with the inflexible higher-ups. For his egregious violation of the party line, he is reassigned to the made-up Eastern European country of Lavernia. Herein begin this films myriad flaws. Why invent a country? There are plenty, and I can't recall a filmmaker getting in trouble for using the name of some former Soviet republic in a film, so what's the point? But I digress. (Editor's Note: And the damn thing just begs for its neighbor to be Shirlia.)

Once Arthur (as he is known consistently in the English dub) arrives in Lavernia, he runs into his new partner/liaison officer Hung Wai-Kwok (Wong). In a matter of moments, things turn inexplicable and Arthur winds up face to face with the vaguely evil Keizo Mishima (Lin), a Japanese cult leader cum terrorist. After that little confrontation there's the soft-focus reunion with his former lover Chan Pun (Qi), who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Here's where the Chinese propaganda starts to get a little thick. You see, Arthur can't forgive his girl for "giving up on her country," the Japanese have an irrational hate-on for China stemming from some sort of weird religious zealotry, and the entire nation of Lavernia is full of pseudo-Slavic thugs who are violently anti-Chinese. But our plucky hero won't let that stand in the way of his saving the world from this Japanese madman and his Lavernian allies.

To make matters worse, the plot from here on in is even less coherent than it sounds above, consisting mainly of Super Chinese Everyman beating the collective asses of everybody involved. Then there's the acting. Or perhaps I should say the complete lack thereof. Lin is passable, though he overplays the religious whackjob a bit. Man-Cheuk's earnestness wears a little thin after the opening few scenes, and Shu Qi essentially has absolutely nothing to do but scream and stare at Man-Cheuk doe-eyed for most of the film. The less said about the Westerners the better, I think.

As I have said before regarding Hong Kong flicks, all of this could've been saved with some decent action choreography and nice set pieces. This has neither. The choreography was old-hat a decade before this film was made, and the set pieces are all just a tad, well, underwhelming. A scene heavily involving rocket launchers is pretty neat, but it's really the lone bright spot in the entire production. Couple all this with a sub-par DVD presentation that provides a photo gallery of just over a dozen stills, trailers for better movies, and nothing else. Non-anamorphic widescreen video is unimpressive. The audio is nice, though, with 5.1 English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Unfortunately, the English voice-acting's bad enough that a Dolby Digital treatment is the proverbial silk's purse from a sow's ear.

Two telling little factoids sum up nicely why one should avoid this movie. First, the original English title was The Black Sheep Affair. When it was time for release in the US, it was renamed in hopes of creating confusion with the 1995 Jet Li vehicle Meltdown. Second, director Allun Lam has only this credit on his resume, which is pretty telling for how well-regarded a film it is in the kung fu picture industry.