Reviewed by: dandan Date: 03/08/2006 Summary: fluff... it has potential, but it never really fulfills it. too much of every action sequence is lost through over stylised, shaky and super fast camera work. michael beihn is dreadfully wooden. now, it was watchable, there was some very nice cinematography floating around and there were a couple of highpoints during sammo's two fights. on the whole though, it just wasn't up to scratch; it suffered from not deciding whether it was being camp and ridiculous or serious and gritty, as a result, it was simply fluff...

Reviewed by: mrblue Date: 01/23/2006 Dragon Squad is yet another unfortunate example of how mashing together Eastern and Western film-making styles often results in a bland product. Helmed by Daniel Lee (Black Mask) and produced by an international team (including the rotund one, Steven Seagal), Dragon Squad certainly looks nice, but there's nothing behind the pretty faces and big explosions. It also seems to forget that action movies are supposed to be fun -- Dragon Squad takes itself far too seriously, and the proceedings comes off as wooden instead of exciting or dramatic. The plot is your standard action movie stuff. For some unexplained reason, a group of young members from various law enforcement organizations are brought together to help protect a criminal as he is brought to court for trial. They fail in the mission, and so Sammo Hung is sent to baby-sit the group, while the police commander (Simon Yam) takes care of business (why Simon just doesn't disband the team is one of the movie's many plot holes). Of course, Simon can't pull off the mission either, so he reluctantly agrees to give the plucky kids one more shot. Even though the plot is pretty simple, Dragon Squad takes forever to move the story along. It clocks in at around two hours, but feels longer than that, because Daniel Lee seems more concerned about showing "touching" scenes like the kids bonding over shooting targets in a gallery or re-using the same comic-book style inserts rather than actually advancing the story. There are quite a few action sequences, which action director Chin Kar-Lok handles well, but most of the excitement is leeched out by the schizophrenic "MTV style" editing that plagues far too many films from both the east and west. All in all, Dragon Squad makes a valiant attempt. Hell, it was nice seeing Sammo starring in a project that wasn't a total embarrassment like most of his recent work like Legend of the Dragon. But the film-makers couldn't seem to pull all of the elements together to make anything other than an average action movie. [review from www.hkfilm.net] Reviewer Score: 5

Reviewed by: MrBooth Date: 01/14/2006 Summary: 7/10 - daft script but INTENSE action Director Daniel Lee serves up what must be one of the most intense action films from Hong Kong in years, a brutally violent cops n' robbers film that has such a fetish for guns and their firing that it borders on obscenity. Well, depending on your views on violence it could be well past obscene - this is not a film for the squeamish! The plot is broadly nonsense - 5 young Asian interpol agents are in Hong Kong for some gangster's trial, but the convoy is ambushed on the way to court. The HK cops don't want them there, but they are determined to get their man (back). Old-timer Sammo Hung has some hang-ups to resolve, and the kids adopt him as a mentor. Michael Biehn (former terminator) leads a gang of international ex-special force mercenary types who provide the Dragon Squad (for I assume that the name of the film is meant to refer to our young heroes) with some opposition. Something like that anyway - I'm not sure the plot makes a lot of sense, and the dialogue is so full of cheese I flushed most of it out my ears as soon as it entered :p Daniel Lee has always tended to visual stylisation, and this film is no exception - there's some very creative and beautiful images to be found, though the film over-does the "people posing with guns are cool" thing in places, turning it into "people posing with guns look silly". There's also a bit of the "hyperactive cameraman + editor" plague that infects so many modern films - there's rarely a static shot that last more than half a second. There are a few shots that specifically recall WHAT PRICE SURVIVAL, but mostly it is a very "modern" film - i.e. shot like an MTV documentary. Acting is a mixed bag, with the non-Cantonese actors fairing better than the HK pop stars overall. Michael Biehn might actually be the first white guy in a HK film who delivers all his lines in English and *doesn't suck at all*. He fits in perfectly in fact, and is totally convincing in his role. His scenes with Li Bingbing (who is still totally hot) are probably the best in the film for drama. Maggie Q also does a good job as a Vietnamese sniper who (IIRC) remains silent throughout the film and is all the tougher for it. Korean actor Hur Jun-Ho also impresses as a villain, especially since he has to speak Mandarin or English for most of the film. In fact, it must be said that the bad guys come off better than the heroes throughout - I forgot I wasn't meant to be rooting for them :p Anyway, enough of such frivolities... this film is really about the action, more than any HK film in recent memory. There's some intense stuff at the beginning, then it's teased out for a while, then things go seriously ballistic for the final act, with some of the longest and wildest shoot-outs filmed in years. There's probably only TIME AND TIDE is in the same league from this millenium. Despite the rapid editing and camera movement, the choreography of the gunplay all flows, and you get a great sense of the layout and movement within the scene - the action shines as being well thought out and put together. I'm tempted to say the gun fights feel very realistic, though the sheer number of bullets fired in the course of 110 minutes makes that claim impossible to justify. The action is refreshingly well crafted, with the kind of attention to detail mixed with creativity that is what put Hong Kong on the map back in its heyday. There's a little bit of non-gun action as well, with Sammo getting a long overdue chance to show some moves... yay! It's guns that Daniel Lee wants to talk to us about in this film though. If it weren't for the action, DRAGON SQUAD would probably just go down as another embarrassing vehicle for a bunch of kids with no charisma and further proof that the territory has forgotten how to make a good film. So if you're not nuts about violence, this isn't a film for you. If you really miss the days when Chow Yun Fat could take out an army with just 2 guns in his hand, come get your fix :) Reviewer Score: 7

Reviewed by: danton Date: 12/04/2005 I know, one or two swallows don't necessarily make it spring, but after seeing SPL and Dragon Squad back to back, I am tempted to proclaim that true HK-style action films are at long last making a comeback in the HK film industry. HK action has always rested on the twin pillars of martial-arts and gunplay. While SPL covers the former in glorious fashion, Dragon Squad is a shining example of the virtues of the latter: Dragon Squad proudly fetishizes guns and their handling, serving up this unapologetic foreplay as a buildup to several climactic, prolonged orgies of gunfire with a hail of bullets, the likes of which have not been seen on a HK movie screen since John Woo's Hardboiled. The plot itself is quite forgettable: 5 youngish cops under the guidance of Simon Yam and Sammo Hung battle 5 international villains. Whenever they meet, it's guns blazing, slo-mo shots of destructive carnage, set to pulsing rhythms and an ever-increasing bodycount. The guns are supported by the odd hand-grenade and some more inventive weapons such as an umbrella (used similar to the palmtree fronds in Eastern Condors) and a motorized fan. The standout performance is delivered by Maggie Q as a Cambodian sniper - she wasn't too convincing in Naked Weapon, but does a great job here. Much of the dialogue is a mishmash of Cantonese, Putonghua and English, but unlike the unfortunate attempts of making "international" action films that were such a disaster 5 or 6 years ago, this film plays like a straight HK action film. Definitely the best gunplay choreography since Tsui Hark's Time And Tide. Recommended.