Dragon Squad is yet another unfortunate example of how mashing together Eastern and Western film-making styles often results in a bland product. Helmed by Daniel Lee (Black Mask) and produced by an international team (including the rotund one, Steven Seagal), Dragon Squad certainly looks nice, but there's nothing behind the pretty faces and big explosions. It also seems to forget that action movies are supposed to be fun -- Dragon Squad takes itself far too seriously, and the proceedings comes off as wooden instead of exciting or dramatic.

The plot is your standard action movie stuff. For some unexplained reason, a group of young members from various law enforcement organizations are brought together to help protect a criminal as he is brought to court for trial. They fail in the mission, and so Sammo Hung is sent to baby-sit the group, while the police commander (Simon Yam) takes care of business (why Simon just doesn't disband the team is one of the movie's many plot holes). Of course, Simon can't pull off the mission either, so he reluctantly agrees to give the plucky kids one more shot.

Even though the plot is pretty simple, Dragon Squad takes forever to move the story along. It clocks in at around two hours, but feels longer than that, because Daniel Lee seems more concerned about showing "touching" scenes like the kids bonding over shooting targets in a gallery or re-using the same comic-book style inserts rather than actually advancing the story. There are quite a few action sequences, which action director Chin Kar-Lok handles well, but most of the excitement is leeched out by the schizophrenic "MTV style" editing that plagues far too many films from both the east and west.

All in all, Dragon Squad makes a valiant attempt. Hell, it was nice seeing Sammo starring in a project that wasn't a total embarrassment like most of his recent work like Legend of the Dragon. But the film-makers couldn't seem to pull all of the elements together to make anything other than an average action movie.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]