Stealing a march by a few weeks on Hong Kong's big end-of-year actioners (Gen-Y Cops and China Strike Force), Skyline Cruisers sails in as a star-laden Golden Harvest item that, like the company's Tokyo Raiders earlier this year, is more a character-driven escapade than the high-tech thriller billed. Helmer Wilson Yip, best known in the West for fest favorites Bullet over Summer and the recent Juliet in Love, is clearly uninterested in making a pure actioner and gives the pic a gliding, allusive feel that momentarily refreshes the genre.
Originally billed as a sequel to Teddy Chen's 1997 Downtown Torpedoes, an angle that's now strenuously denied by Golden Harvest, pic was, surprisingly, line produced by UFO, better known for contemporary relationship pictures. As in Torpedoes (a rip-off of Mission: Impossible), back-of-a-coaster story centers on a group of tech wizards for hire, here called in to recover a cure for cancer stolen by Kam (veteran actor-director Patrick Lung). Jetting in from their hideaway in Australia, the foursome - Mac, Bird, Michelle and Sam - head for Kam's lab in Kuala Lumpur to steal back the drug. Mac is approached by the mysterious June, who claims to be Kam's secretary and wants to help them.
Most of the memorable action is in two set pieces that take place before the main story begins. Thereafter, pic maintains a breezy, jokey style (complete with a chimpanzee joining the group), with tightly clipped dialogue and an almost parodic approach to the genre. Tone is maintained to the very end, when a series of captions, linked to clips from the film, tells the audience to "Wake up your friends" and "Turn your mobile phones on".
Derek Elley