Time and Tide

Financed (like Crouching Tiger) by Columbia Asia, this represents yet another attempt at self-renewal by Tsui Hark, lately reduced to doing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. The two protagonists, both with nine-months-pregnant women on their backs, are small-time chancers who become friends and then find themselves in opposite camps. Tyler (Tse) works for Ji (Wong) and is assigned to guard a triad boss under threat of assassination by a Brazilian gang. Jack (Wu) is married to the threatened man's daughter, but his chequered past leaves him vulnerable to pressure from the Brazilians. The maternity-in-peril stuff has been done before by John Woo and Cha Chuen-Yee, and the set-piece climax (a full scale gun battle which rages from Hung Hom railway station to the Coliseum, hosting a rock concert at the time) is tediously over-extended and repetitive. But the earlier shoot-out in a crumbling resettlement estate is inventive, well-paced and superbly choreographed.