2/9/2024 0 Comments Helios movie janice manCold War worked well in its office-based confrontations, but lacked the necessary pay-off during street-level confrontations. This time around, the boardroom becomes a politically-volatile international stage, with Hong Kong proving little more than a battered pawn in the proceedings. With their first feature, Leung and Luk explored power struggles and bureaucracy within the Hong Kong police force whilst dealing with a similarly destabilising terror plot. But when Korean authorities send NIS Agent Pok Yu-Chit (Choi Siwon) and weapons expert Choi Min-ho (Ji Jin-hee) after their device, Chinese authorities fear an international crisis, and employ their own senior advisor, Song An (Wang Xueqi) to oversee the situation. Local Police Inspector Lee Yin-ming (Nick Cheung) brings in physics professor Siu Chi-yan (Jacky Cheung) to consult on the case. Renowned arms dealer Helios (Chang Chen) steals a South Korean WMD and high-tails it to Hong Kong looking to make a quick sale. After the commercial success of their debut Cold War (the highest-grossing Hong Kong film in 2012) writer-director team Longman Leung and Sunny Luk set their sights higher with Helios, a pan-continental terrorism thriller that sees law enforcement agencies from South Korea, China and Hong Kong scramble to recover a stolen nuclear weapon.įor all its international star power bravado, Helios makes little effort to develop its characters or fully exploit its cast.Ĭlosing the 5th Beijing International Film Festival, Helios boasts a strong international cast and slick, glossy production values, but ties itself up in clumsy political shenanigans to the detriment of its expertly-executed action sequences. While the film’s narrative knots won’t prevent it reaching a broad audience in Asian markets hungry for big-name, high-octane multiplex kicks, other viewers may despair as the script becomes increasingly compromised.
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