Reviewed by: ryan Date: 11/21/1999 Summary: Heaven of the Hope (1999) Judging from the casting of 'Heaven of Hope', the cast is quite strong as we have Anthony WONG Chan-sang and Sam LEE Chan-sum. However, it is also very strange to note that BIG-Mandarin Circuit has fixed the period of showing for the movie. Probably they are going to change to 'Bullets over Summer' on 5 August 1999. Does this indicate the quality of the movie? Let's take a look. 'Heave of Hope' started with a priest (Anthony WONG Chau-sang) who helps drag addicted teenagers to keep away from drugs. One night, the priest has got a phone call that her daughter Mandy has died. However, the fact is that the cops find the pager of Mandy around the dead body. Mandy has been out of contact with the Priest for months. The priest decided to try to find his daughter by going to the night clubs. In the night club, they finally find that Mandy has been with Hawk (Sam LEE Chan-sum) and she becomes a trash girl. He decided to fused into the triad group to find Mandy. In the triad group, it is in-charged by two guys -- Coffin (CHAN Wai-man) and Brother Cool (WONG Kar-lok) while Brother Cool is the Big brother of Hawk. However, the priest's plan seems to be too optimistic. He tried to rescue the girls in Hawk's group from drugs but unveiled by Hawk. Finally he is being punished...... Judging from the casting, you may consider there is a guarantee for the quality. If you answer is yes, I am afraid this will be a disappointing movie. The main problem of the movie is the plot has no focus. After you watch the whole movie I am afraid that it hard to find the focus. It seems that they tried to have some refresh on the days between the Priest and Mandy. However, at the end of the movie, I cannot find any thing impressive about the relationship of Mandy and the Priest. I consider one of the pitfalls is the lack of critical descriptions on their relationships. At least they should have mentioned why Mandy left from her Dad. Another problem of the movie is that it is too typical while actors are lack of opportunities to act. Sam LEE is just duplicate what he has done in his past movies as a street boys, Anthony WONG is one again act as a priest. You can almost tell them had put no effort in the movie by seeing how they act. There are lack of interactions between the castings. The filling of tricks in cinematography did not help to add values to the movie. It seems to me that the whole movie is just trying to put all tons of fighting scenes and triad scenes together. The internal relationship is lack of details. For example, it seems that there should be something behind the relationship of Inspector CHEUNG, Brother Cool and Coffin but they just presented it by having a drink together. The relationship between the Priest and Hawk's girl is also lack of description which makes the whole movie with fragments. In terms of performance, as I mentioned earlier. All the main castings have no opportunity to act. There should be something for Anthony WONG to show his concern to the girls and how he maintained his faith. There should also be something to talk about the conflicts of characters inside Sam LEE while there should be more variety of scenes for WONG Ka-lok to act. More unfortunate is that the voice of Sam LEE in 'Hope of Heaven' is dubbed which makes it even harder for audience to accept. All in all, 'Heaven of Hope' failed to give hope to audience even though we have Anthony WONG and Sam LEE. Once again, this is a good lesson to teach producers that audience demand better directions and better scripts.