A Little Touch of Seoul

Thank God for Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The best actor working in Asian cinema today can redeem any scene and endow even the most artificial plot with a few degrees of soul. Like Chow Yun-fat before he disappeared into Hollywood, Leung seems able to rise above his material and effortlessly make off with any film. It’s no surprise that he plays such an accomplished thief in his latest project, the diverting Seoul Raiders.

The movie is a sequel to 2000’s highly successful Tokyo Raiders, by director Jingle Ma, whose name appropriately evokes the sound box-office cash registers were making this Lunar New Year season throughout the Chinese-speaking world. In Tokyo Raiders, Ma moved the standard Hong Kong action-comedy plot (cop, girl, gangsters, slow-motion spin kicks) to Japan. But Tokyo is so five minutes ago compared with red-hot Korea. Time for a remake. Leung and his fellow Tokyo cast members are sent packing to Seoul.

Leung plays Lam, a master burglar out to nick a pair of ultra-valuable currency-printing plates, which, if they fell into the wrong hands, would allow criminal forces to flood the U.S. market with counterfeit bills. That’s why both Korean mobsters and “Arab dissenters,” in the curious words of Leung’s character, are desperate to get their own hands on the goods. (Maybe they’ve invested heavily in the euro.) Leung nabs them, but on his way to claim his reward from a grateful U.S. government, he’s waylaid and re-robbed by rival thief Owen Lee (Richie Jen). That sets off a cat-and-cat game between Leung and Jen in Seoul, with pillow-lipped, helium-voiced JJ (Shu Qi) as a third thief who fetchingly gets in everyone’s way. As the story unfolds, the plot ties itself into some complicated knots, despite the best efforts of director Ma, who has the characters stop punching and kicking each other every five minutes or so to explain what’s going on.

Presumably these expository time-outs also give the actors a chance to catch their breath between nearly nonstop action sequences. Ma, who worked with Jackie Chan on some of the superstar’s best films, can shoot fight scenes that dodge and weave between ridiculous and dangerous. The 42-year-old Leung is no Jackie Chan (alas, neither is Jackie Chan these days), but he moves with a swashbuckling rhythm. Shu bats her eyes ferociously. Ma’s easygoing balance gets a bit lost by the big finale. We won’t say what happens, but it includes the line: “How can a plane collide with a bus?”

Seoul Raiders is a Lunar New Year movie, the cinematic equivalent of a red packet of lai see money. But it’s Leung’s laid-back attitude that makes this trifle go down easier, as he walks around Seoul with a Cheshire cat’s grin. After four years of surviving endless takes by meticulous Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, who worked with him in the recent 2046, Leung deserves a New Year vacation away from his home city—and from self-serious filmmaking.