Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Okay, let's get something straight. This movie, the pilot episode of a short-lived cable TV series, is nowhere near as good as the original Once a Thief that John Woo made in Hong Kong in 1990. Remakes seldom can live up to the original—even remakes by the same director. But that's not why this is a bad movie.

This is a bad movie because...well...it's just a bad movie. It's cheesy and campy as all get-out. But even cheesy movies can have a certain amount of fun to them, and this one is no exception. It attains a certain level of enjoyability to watch, though undoubtedly not in the way in which its makers intended.

The storyline of this Once a Thief has about a 33% congruence with the plot of the old Once a Thief. The old version was a comedy about two guys and a girl who grew up together as siblings under the tutelage of a Fagin-like adoptive father who is also a Hong Kong crime lord. They grew tired of their father using them at about the same time he came to consider them loose ends, and the movie was about how they came to get out from under his thumb when he wanted them to steal one last painting for him.

The new movie has similar elements: two guys and a girl, painting, crime lord...but the role of the second guy is sort of split between a guy who has most of his characteristics but doesn't appear until halfway through the movie, and a third guy—the real son of the crime lord. Then you throw in the leather-clad dominatrix and her top secret government agency...but I get ahead of myself.

Without giving everything away, the story is that the one guy, Mac Ramsey (Ivan Sergei), and the girl, Li Ann Tsei (Sandrine Holt) are partners in crime (and affection) who want to get out from under the thumb of said Hong Kong crime lord (Robert Ito, who is actually of Japanese descent...it irritates me sometimes how Hollywood assumes that one Oriental race is interchangeable with another for casting purposes). They also want to leave their other partner, Michael Tang (Michael Wong), the Godfather's son (who also has romantic designs on Li Ann), behind...and their plan to get the money to do this involves raiding the Godfather's gunrunning operation disguised as a flour packing plant. Unfortunately, the robbery is botched and Li Ann gets away while Mac spends the next eighteen months in prison.

Enter the leather-clad dominatrix Director (Jennifer Dale) of a secret government police agency, a "twisted leather freak" ("Twisted? Yes. Freak? That's a little strong") who steals Mac's clothes(!) and makes him an offer he can't refuse: come to work for her agency in Vancouver, or be pardoned...and tossed out in the street where his life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel. The Director having firmly established herself as the alpha female in the neighborhood, Mac has no choice but to go along. He is happier about it when he finds out that Li Ann is also working for the agency...but unhappier when he finds out that she's engaged to their third partner, Victor Mansfield (Nicholas Lea), a straight-laced cop with whom Mac is destined to clash from the very beginning.

And just wait until they learn that Michael Tang and his family are about to come back into their lives again...

Much as I hate to say it, this movie combines all the worst elements of John Woo with the worst elements of a TV series pilot. There can be no real resolution, because this has to set up for the events of a series, not wrap things up—I gather that even the major character who "dies" toward the end of the movie comes back in a later episode of the series. And by making it a drama instead of the comedy that was the original, Woo and the writers undercut their own creation: things that would come off as amusing gags in a comedy (as they did in the original Once a Thief) clash with the underlying seriousness of the plot and are thus made camp.

And there are so many "Woo trademarks" that appear, they don't even seem to do it naturally—it's like someone was going through with a checklist saying, "Guns held at each other's faces, check; white roses, check; slow motion bullet ballet, check; chandelier scene from the original Once a Thief, check..." It's almost as if it was filmed by some nameless director who was trying hard to be Woo, not by Woo himself. There are also a few editing gaffes, such as the scene where a car screeches to a halt in video that's clearly been shot slow and sped up because they didn't want to damage their presumably-rented car.

Even so, there are some jewels among the rough. Woo's directorial style comes through in little scenes like the dance contest that starts off the show, or the amusing little scene where Mac goes through Li Ann's apartment replacing all the red roses with white roses, and at the same time Victor is going through replacing the white ones with red. There are also a few decent action sequences (more so with the addition of several minutes of footage that had to be cut for time and TV rating constraints), though nothing close to what Woo did in Hard-Boiled or even Face/Off. The tragedy is that you have to watch things like the Director doing everything but spray the furniture along with those good parts.

There is almost no chemistry among the principal actors in this movie. It may sound strange to say that, given that Mac and Victor are not supposed to hit it off well, but even their antagonistic relationship didn't come off as particularly believable. What's more, almost none of the principals can act worth a darn. Ivan Sergei is probably the best of any of them (excepting Robert Ito, who has probably been acting for longer than Sergei's been alive, but Ito has a very small part overall); he has the closest thing the role of Chow Yun Fat in the original and he would come pretty close to pulling it off except for his all-too-often lapses into Luke Skywalker-like whininess; he's also got the only character who's anywhere near sympathetic in this mess. Nicholas Lea is more wooden than anything else, Sandrine Holt is just sort of there, and Jennifer Dale gleefully overplays the Director in a way that makes you wonder why there's any scenery left that doesn't show toothmarks by the end of the movie. Michael Wong is another wooden one...and his idea of acting out emotional scenes seems to be just to raise his voice and act louder.

The DVD itself is a bare-bones affair. (Extras? What extras?) There's a scene selection screen with eight chapter stops, and a "Film Facts" screen that shows when and where it was filmed and who starred in it, and a play button. That's it. Audio is 2-channel uncompressed LPCM, and the video is full-frame MPEG-2 at a fairly low bitrate. It looks decent for non-anamorphic, and sounds about as good as could be expected for non-surround stereo.

The American Once a Thief meanders cheerfully along in a cavalcade of camp, but is not entirely without merit. If it's cheap enough to buy, or available to rent, it might make a good bad movie night...and even the worst John Woo is still occasionally enjoyable.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older