Reviewed by: mrblue Date: 11/13/2005 In Set Up, Christy Chung plays a writer who gets lasik surgery. The operation leaves her with temporary blindness, and while she is recuperating at her new house, a trio of criminals (led by Roy Cheung) hiding out from a robbery storm in and kill everyone in the house except for Christy. As her sight slowly returns, Christy must play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the crooks in order to stay alove long enough until the cops show up. With this sort of plot and Wong Jing writing and producing the project, I thought Set Up might have been a nice, bloody female revenge flick in the vein of some of the classics of the genre like Her Vengeance. These types of movies weren't even produced too often during Hong Kong's modern "golden age" of film-making, and it has been several years since a mainstream star has appeared in a revenge picture, so I was (even with Hong Kong's fairly dismal output this year) pretty excited to check out Set Up. Sadly, this movie is nowhere close to being a classic, much less even an average Wong Jing sex and violence romp. Set Up's biggest problem is probably the pacing. There's just way too much time dedicated to throwaway scenes like Christy gabbing with her girlfriends. It takes about a half-hour for the story to really get going, and by that point, I had, for the most part, lost interest. Also, Christy's character is never fully developed -- more screen time is given to her sister (played by Winnie Leung), which seems strange, given the sister's relative unimportance in the plot as a whole. Probably most damningly, Set Up is just plain boring -- there's not even the trademark boobs and blood one would expect from a Wong Jing movie of this type. There are a couple of good points about Set Up that ultimately save it from B-movie hell. Roy Cheung does some solid work -- but this guy's played so many criminals in his career, he can probably pull off this kind of performance in his sleep. Christy Chung, as one would expect, looks very nice, even though she's stuck wearing the same outfit for most of the movie. There's also a couple of scenes where Christy sets up traps for the criminals that show a bit of promise. Unfortunately, like most recent Hong Kong productions, Set Up seems to promise a lot of things, but never delivers on any of them. [review from www.hkfilm.net] Reviewer Score: 3