The final entry in Michael and Johnny Mak's Long Arm of the Law series, Underground Express once again tells a story of gangsters versus police, focusing on the difference between how both factions act depending if they're coming from Hong Kong or Mainland China. There's some decent action that delivers a high body count, but the rushed production and editing that was obviously and clumsily done to avoid a Category III rating regulates this to being just another average Hong Kong cops and robbers flick.

Like the other movies in the series, Underground Express is related to the previous films in name only. This time out, the focus is on a group of Mainland soldiers (led by Elvis Tsui) who are trying to use the chaos surrounding protests by students in Hong Kong following the Tiananmen Square Massacre to rob a bank. After the protests are canceled due to overzealous police enforcement, the soldiers decide to accept a job from a principal to smuggle some student dissidents who are at risk of being executed out of the Mainland.

Seeing as how no one involved on this production seemed to care, instead seemingly content to make yet another cheap early 1990's action movie to generate a quick buck, the results aren't that compelling. Elvis Tsui is the de facto hero, but is killing dozens of Mainland and Hong Kong police officers who are ostensibly just doing their job a heroic action? He's not really an anti-hero either, seeming to waffle from scene to scene, which just leads to the viewer becoming confused.

It doesn't help that the subtitles are atrocious, and not, for the most part, in that fun "Chinglish" kind of way. There's many points where you simply can't read them because they're either cut off or obscured by objects on the screen. This makes the attempts Underground Express tries to make later in the movie to create deep social comments on cultural change and adaptation in a post-Tiananmen world an exercise in futility.

That sort of sloppy and incomplete feeling is most pointedly seen in what should be Underground Express' biggest draw, the action scenes. Simply put, they're not all that great. Sure, they're better than your average US B-movie, but by Hong Kong standards, they're anemic and awkward. Any sense of pending excitement over gratuitous bloodshed is often dashed right away via "after-market" edits that cut out the naughty bits away right when the gunplay shenanigans get too hot for the censors. The let-down of the action scenes is representative of the downfall of the Long Arm of the Law series, which thankfully was put to rest after this film.

RATING: 5

Note: this review is based on the Fortune Star "Legendary Collection" VCD, which runs about seventeen minutes shorter than the DVD version. Thanks to Ken at So Good Reviews for the info.