When it comes to staging all-out action mayhem, Hong Kong filmmakers will have a hard time this year beating Dante Lam's The Viral Factor. In just the opening scenes, filmed in Jordan, Lam stages an assault sequence complete with rocket-launched grenades and running gun battles. And when the narrative picks up soon afterwards in Malaysia, car crashes, bomb blasts, yet more gunfire and even a downtown helicopter chase are strung together for a high-budget stunts and thrills extravaganza.
Those early scenes in Jordan see Taiwan actor Jay Chou introduced as Jon Man, a special ops ace in the International Defence Commission, or IDC. He's in Jordan to help escort and protect a doctor who holds the secrets of a deadly smallpox virus strain. Needless to say, the job doesn't go to plan. Staging an explosive attack, a team of terrorists including IDC member Sean Wong (Andy On) soon seize the doctor and kill Jon's lover Ice. They also leave a bullet in Jon's head.
With only weeks left to live, Jon first spends time with his mother in China, then jets off to Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur to find his long-lost father (Liu Kai-chi) and elder brother Man Yeung (Nicholas Tse). Cue more conflict: Yeung, it turns out, is a violent criminal who's on the run from the law and has been hired by Sean to kidnap a doctor, Rachel (Lin Peng). She's skilled in working with viruses and can pick up where that doctor from Jordan – now dead – had left off. As it happens, Rachel befriended Jon on his flight to Malaysia, and Yeung's attempts to grab her end up having him face off with Jon. When the two brothers meet, Jon must choose between hauling Yeung in for his wrongdoings, or protecting him from the bad guys he's mixed up with.
Recent years have seen Lam's career as writer-director hit overdrive with a string of popular thriller-melodramas in The Beast Stalker, Fire of Conscience and The Stool Pigeon. The films' gritty atmospherics and heavyweight plots aim for maximum emotional punch, with scarred, turmoil-ridden characters at their heart. The dramatic and personal elements Lam and regular scriptwriting collaborator Jack Ng bring to the screen also inspire powerhouse performances from the films' lead actors, celebrated most clearly in prizes like Nicholas Tse's Best Actor win at last year's Hong Kong Film Awards for The Stool Pigeon. In The Viral Factor, Tse runs wild with the athletic, hot-blooded performance demanded by the script, while Jay Chou is tasked with both thrills and brief moments of calm in the high-octane mix.
Lam's typically pained protagonists are certainly in evidence in The Viral Factor, and the film comes with a neat coda to provide non-flashy Hong Kong roots. But this time the filmmaking is primarily action-driven, not skewing more toward intricate plotting and weighty emotions. By setting the action outside China, the filmmakers get away with themes otherwise sensitive with censors in the important mainland market, such as scenes involving corrupt cops and having a likeable rogue in a leading role, and they also strive for an undeniably Hollywood-esque feel in some sequences, especially those shot in Jordan.
The Viral Factor's action choreography, largely orchestrated by Chin Kar-lok and Wong Wai-fai and thankfully free from obvious CGI, is an incendiary spectacle of explosions, fierce shootouts and outrageous stunts best seen on a cinema screen. When a car plunges into a roadside ditch, for instance, the camera is shockingly close to the action. And if it's not enough for someone to survive a multi-story fall once onscreen, the filmmakers happily revisit such recklessness again and again. Implausibility and staggering coincidence are both regular and casual, and characters manage to walk away from all manner of life-threatening chaos. Sure, logic may get thrown to the wind, but in its sheer extravagance and audaciousness The Viral Factor channels the widescreen excesses that helped put Hong Kong cinema on the map for so many international moviegoers.
Tim Youngs