The sixth Herman Yau film released in the last two years is probably the strangest. Long a denizen of Hong Kong’s underground, making his name in the ’90s with a series of ultra-violent and gory Category III thrillers that had a strong element of social and political protest (Taxi Hunter, The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) before transitioning into more traditionally prestigious fare (From the Queen to the Chief Executive), Yau has spent the 2000s as a competent and prolific craftsman of genre films, excelling in everything from biopic (his Ip Man films are better than Donnie Yen’s), to romantic comedy (77 Heartbreaks), to horror (The Sleep Curse), to black comedy (A Home with a View), to traditional action film (Shock Wave). In recent years, after completing a dissertation on the history of film censorship in China, Yau has worked extensively on the Mainland, producing a series of films that ostensibly glorify the nation’s various security services, while underneath displaying an uneasiness with military power and control. Customs Frontline is one of his least transgressive in this regard, a movie seemingly pulled in three different directions by Yau and his stars, Nicholas Tse and Jacky Cheung.
Tse, a TV chef and a guy who has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Faye Wong for decades, stars as a member of the Hong Kong branch of China’s Customs department. Cheung, a major movie and pop star since the late ’80s, plays his boss. Their job amounts to patrolling around Hong Kong harbor and inspecting the various boats that they see, all while armed with a variety of machine guns. As these things go, they come across a smuggling ring, one which is sending arms to both sides of a war between fictional African nations. The leader of the ring is a woman known only as “Dr. Raw,” which, by the way, is “War” spelled backwards.
Chef Nic heads off to the Middle East and Africa along with a Thai-Chinese-American Interpol agent (played by Cya Liu, from Soi Cheang’s Limbo) to investigate. Meanwhile, Cheung stays behind to deal with various conflicts: one between his boss (Francis Ng) and his girlfriend (another Customs higher-up, played by Karena Lam); one between his girlfriend and himself; and one between himself and his bipolar disorder. Cheung does a lot of acting in these scenes, which Yau films alternate versions of through weird filters and blur effects as Cheung’s emotional states fluctuate wildly. Tse’s travelogue scenes, for instance, are filmed through the yellow filters borrowed from Hollywood whenever they have to shoot something that’s supposed to take place in Mexico or some other warm and underdeveloped country.
Those are also where most of the action scenes take place, which the credits tell us Tse choreographed himself. There aren’t a lot of them though. He gets a nifty fight on a rubber boat in the movie’s opening moments, and one very cool one near the end of the film where he takes on a gang of bad guys, shot in a handheld long take from what appears to be one of the villain’s points of view. But for the most part, the action is of the guns and explosions variety. Unfortunately, Cya Liu is mostly an afterthought in these scenes. She’s a much better actor than Tse, but the choreography doesn’t give her much to do other than scream and get captured.
If Cheung’s interest in the movie is getting to play a psychologically conflicted — and not just because of his bipolar disorder — character, and Tse’s is in getting to show off his action skills, where is the Herman Yau in Customs Frontline? Is he working here as a competent craftsman to facilitate the interests of his star actors, or is there something of the old punk ethos to be found? Most of Yau’s recent films have been about Chinese security services, and for the most part they’re played straight, one would think to satisfy the demands of the country’s arcane censorship requirements. But Yau somehow always pushes the logic of the state apparatus to absurd levels: following the logic of the drug war to its absurd vigilante conclusions in White Storm 2, and then in The White Storm 3 demonstrating the sheer destructive power of the state in the service of that war. Raid on the Lethal Zone pits border security against not only smugglers, but also the overwhelming and unstoppable forces of nature. Moscow Mission, The Leakers, and Death Notice weave tangled, nigh impenetrable plots around conspiracies and double crosses, where criminals, states, corporations, and law enforcement become indistinguishable from each other.
Customs Frontline doesn’t really have that kind of edge to it. Maybe there’s something in Cheung’s fractured personality as representative of Hong Kong’s relationship to the PRC, but that seems a bit far-fetched. White Storm 3 and Death Notice have in common the fact that they rely on Honk Kong stars who are way too old to be playing the characters they’re playing, a by-product of the stranglehold those stars have had on the industry in the 2000s and the related fact that Hong Kong cinema has been unable to develop new stars they way it did from the ’60s though the ’90s. There’s a nod to that kind of thing here: a brief reveal that claims that Cheung’s character was born in 1979, a full 18 years after Cheung’s real birthdate. But honestly, the most that Herman Yau can be found in this movie is at its end. That comes first with the idea that the smugglers are shipping a submarine (a boat inside of a boat!), and second with the glorious destruction of much of Hong Kong’s gentrified waterfront by the cops and crooks shooting it out at sea, giant ocean liners plowing through over-priced restaurants and the like. It doesn’t look all that real, but not much does in mainstream Chinese cinema these days.
DIRECTOR: Herman Yau; CAST: Jacky Cheung, Nicolas Tse, Karena Lam, Liu Yase; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: July 19; RUNTIME: 2 hr.
