Made for a modest budget of $17 million — and feeling like it (who needs convincing explosions in an action movie?), Dante Lam's latest still gets the job done from a run-and-gun standpoint. If you don't mind your exposition tossed off during cell phone conversations, all the better! The tale, typical boilerplate, involves a plot by Sean Wong (Andy Tien), the duplicitous former leader of an IDC military unit, to sell a mutated smallpox strain to the highest, blondest bidder. So underling agent Jon (The Green Hornet's Jay Chou), despite having one of Wong's bullets lodged in his brain, has to hunt the sharpshooting shit down. If this isn't enough, Yeung (Nicholas Tse, star of Lam's The Beast Stalker), the bad apple brother Jon doesn't know he has, is mixed up in this viral mess spanning locations in China, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Yes, standard stuff, but Chou and Tse have the chops for this brand of socky.
