Pure Tsui satisfaction

>> Time and Tide finetunes the Hong Kong bullet ballet

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

There's no question that Tsui Hark, regarded as the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong, has a knack for damn near defining entire genres. With the Once Upon a Time in China series, he not only kicked off Jet Li's career but legitimized wire-fighting neo-fu in the West (choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping would go on to infamy for his work on The Matrix). Chinese Ghost Story breathed life into the silk-and-ectoplasm Chinese-gothic concept, while an animated retread thereof served a challenge to the Japanese anime scene, otherwise dominating Asian cartoons. Furthermore, with his Hollywood foray Knock Off, he delivered the damn-near impossible: a tolerable Jean-Claude Van Damme flick. Imagine that!

In the director's chair once again for Time and Tide, a high-end HK production, Hark isn't inventing any new categories. He's not even rewriting the rulebook for Asian action flicks. He is, however, showing us that discretion is the better part of inventiveness--and this from one of modern cinema's most inventive talents.

The film starts innocuously enough. Tyler, a shiftless young HK lad, has a drink-off with a jilted dyke who ends up, to her own shock and dismay, in his bed. She's actually an undercover cop, and soon a resentful, pregnant one at that. Tyler, meanwhile, takes up with the sketchy bodyguard operation of Uncle Ji (an uncharacteristically low-key Anthony Wong). Tyler's aim is to score enough green to bolt for sunny, lazy Brazil.

Back from Brazil, with nothing but bad memories, is gun-for-hire Jack. Bitter and disillusioned, he's focused on a pregnant lady of his own, his wife Hui--estranged daughter of crime lord Hong, whom Uncle Ji's boys are hired to protect and Jack's erstwhile comrades are gunning for. Obviously, Jack and Tyler's paths will have to cross, in the classic HK bullets 'n' buddies style. And then, in equally classic style, everything must fall-down-go-boom.

As I said, it's damn near by the numbers, despite the curious double-pregnancy gimmick (even that plays out with a baby-save recalling Hard Boiled). If anything, though, the familiar turf allows Hark to show off, or rather not show off, what a mature and precise director he is. The complexities of the first reel, establishing the whos and whys, come across clear as day despite the frenetic pace--chalk it up to Hark's clever stylistic mélange.

The fancy technology that Hark employs maximizes the action scenes without excess. An example: when Tyler wings a bad guy, Hark coulda gone for the gouts of blood and slow-mo spasms, but instead merely digi-deletes an earlobe. Blink and you'll miss it. Plenty of other tricks, the kind petrifying critics scowl at as "rock video" stuff, are used with equal restraint.

Well, okay, maybe not the apartment explosion, frozen mid-boom for a 3-D zip-through leading into the fridge where Tyler has tucked himself. That's pretty crazy stuff.

Bottom line: Time and Tide won't recalibrate the genre. It will, however, please not only hardcore fans of HK crime movies but also those merely sympathetic, yet selective.

Time and Tide opens Friday, June 15 at Cinéma du Parc