Violent Cop
2000; directed by Steve Cheng

There's a line spoken in Violent Cop by one of the great thespians of our time, Michael Wong: "How could such a religious man not achieve graduating?" No, that's not one of your typical badly-translated Hong Kong subtitles -- though this movie is indeed full of them. Having one of the most wooden actors to grace a modern Hong Kong screen utter those extremely poorly-written and obviously grammatically incorrect series of words that someone thought formed a type of a semblance of a sentence pretty much sums up how much quality this production has to offer the potential viewer.

Taking more than a bit of inspiration from David Fincher's Se7en, Violent Cop has our boy Michael Fitzgerald Wong playing a half-Cuban named... wait for it... Cuba. Yeah, that's right. So not only do we get Mr. Wong mangling English and Cantonese, for a bonus, shitty Spanish is thrown in as well. This script is getting better all the time, isn't it? Anyway, Cuba is pursuing a serial killer who uses religion to choose who his next victim will be. Most of Cuba's super-sleuthing work consists of using AltaVista to do internet searches about religion. When the killer is revealed, it'll come as no surprise to the audience, but it still takes lil' Mikey another good half-hour to bring the psycho to justice, by which point the audience isn't really likely to give a damn about the outcome.

There's a reason Violent Cop ran in Hong Kong cinemas for exactly four days and made a whopping $10,575. It's just not very good. While the movie does hold a bit of promise and shows a glimmer of hope in a couple of scenes, in the end, this ends up being just another average and derivative Hong Kong release that seems to embrace many pitfalls as an easy way out, while taking no initiative at all to separate itself from the pack, which practically ensures this movie's somewhat firm place in obscure low-budget Hong Kong B-movie history.

RATING: 4