Of all the various riffs on the Romeo and Juliet theme that exist, Tsui Hark's Wicked City just might be the strangest. Monsters, psychic powers, and a touch of wire-fu fill in for the Montagues and the Capulets.

Lung (Jackie Cheung: Bullet in the Head, Once Upon a Time in China) is a cop on a special monster fighting squad. His latest assignment is to capture Yuen (Tatsuya Nakadai: Ran, Yojimbo), the 150 year-old leader of a society of monsters (which all have human form -- the better to blend in with you, my dear). The problem is that Lung's old flame Gaye (Michelle Reis: A Chinese Ghost Story Part II) is now Yuen's mistress. It's a bit of an ethical no-no for monster hunters to be dating monsters.

Things are more complex than they seem. Lung's partner, Ying (Leon Lai: City Hunter) is half-monster. Yuen's group of monsters apparently control the entire human economy but want to co-exist peacefully with mankind. There is another faction of monster that merely want to eradicate humanity. So Lung's got a tough gig, what with trying to track down the monsters without having to "arrest" (it seems funny that they are arresting them for being monsters - shades of Nazi Germany?) either Ying or Gaye, whom Lung still has feelings for.

The plot is rather convoluted, and it gets more so as the movie progresses. The forbidden love bit between Lung and Gaye is one of the center pieces, but like many of the things in Wicked City, it only gets a portion of the focus. Perhaps that's this movie's greatest strength and flaw: it packs so much stuff into ninety minutes that you get a lot out of the time spent, though not everything gets the movie's full attention.

Granted, Hark does a remarkable job building inventive and reasonably cohesive set pieces. He tends to throw so much at us that some of it is bound to work. It's kind of like New York weather, as the saying goes. If something doesn't work for you, wait a few minutes and you'll see something new. Personally, this approach was great fun to watch, with idea after idea packed into the film rapid fire, only occasionally reusing something.

So what are these "things" and this "stuff" that Hark is pitching at us? Mostly creative special effects and monster powers. While some of these effects look a bit hokey and dated, the innovative design more than makes up for it. Characters slide into their shadows, fling silverware and clockwork from their abdomen, and surf atop jumbo jets. There's a really interesting character who can liquify and reform using whatever mechanical bits she picks up. She becomes a pinball machine (rather erotically - I always suspected something about those games), a motorcycle, and the top several stories of a skyscraper. It's all great full to see what's going to happen next.

The characters and new plot points are presented to us very matter-of-fact, so when we find out that the monsters have been running the economy for years, we nod; sure, that makes sense, why wouldn't they? Monsters (Reptoids in other versions, I believe) need electricity to recharge? Yeah, why not. Characters are drawn in the same way, revealing themselves through explicit dialog. Normally, I'd fault this as a bad thing, but here it works. Once they tell you (or a stand-in character) something about themselves as an explicit character point, you don't feel cheated. Hell, you've probably been suspecting the same thing for a while now.

Hark's direction is wild, yet appropriate, assured but never jarring. The entire movie (except for a couple of key moments - flashbacks, mostly) is filmed in shades of blue, white, and black, a perpetual nighttime. The camera moves rollercoaster-like over the action, swooping hither and thither to perch at odd and intriguing angles. Hark frames the shots to give a surreal feel to the whole thing, as if we just found a window into some slightly different universe where monsters do exist along side humans.

Like a good amount of far east cinema, Wicked City concerns itself with commenting on what it is to be human, specifically human emotions. Gaye often wishes she knew what it was like to be human and feel emotions like they do. Yuen chuckles and replies that humans bottle their emotions, that they hardly know what it is to be human themselves. This sort of wishing and wondering about humanity is fairly common in both anime (Ghost in the Shell springs to mind) and Hong Kong cinema (I believe White Snake, Green Snake covers these themes). I'd be curious if someone could trace this to some cultural basis.

My copy had decent subtitles, though flubs like "What a nerve!" instead of "What nerve!" slipped in. People, do I need to tell you that subtitles are the way to go with non-English movies? For some reason, voice actors all seem to put all the emotion of potato peeling into their efforts. But I could have done without the schmaltzy soft pop score. Blech. Anyone besides me think that Asian pop might actually be worse than American pop? Though that's like saying tuberculosis is worse than malaria. Okay, 'nuff ranting.

Wicked City is a fun, inventive import from one of Honk Kong's more interesting directors (though Tsui Hark did direct Knock Off and Double Team). If you can find a copy or if The Movie Channel plays this late night again, I say y'all chekitawt.



Recommended: Yes