Chan Chun (Nicholas Tse) is a cop who lost his fiancée when a jewellery shop gets blown up as a result of a hit on an armoured car. Carson Fong (Shawn Yu) is another cop who is beaten and humiliated by a criminal gang. Wai King-Ho is yet another cop, this time one who has lost his brother. All three join up to bring down the Tien gang headed by Tien Yeng-Seng (Wu Jing), the gang responsible for all three officers’ circumstances.

INVISIBLE TARGET starts out with a bang not unlike a Hollywood blockbuster. It serves as a plot point in that Chan Chun’s fiancée gets killed (no great loss – she doesn’t have her own voice. I don’t think I could ever love a woman who was badly dubbed) and sends him on a path of revenge. It easily brings to mind films like DIE HARD and you start to worry that this is going to be yet another Hong Kong film aping Hollywood and failing miserably. While this is true to a small degree regarding the CGI, let me put your fears at rest and tell you categorically that INVISIBLE TARGET is a darn good romp.

Nicholas Tse gets a lot of stick for his film work (I admit I’ve never heard a note of his music and am quite happy to keep it that way) but fair’s fair, he puts on a good show as the haunted young cop out for revenge. I must admit that Shawn Yu has previously slipped under my radar, but he also impresses as Tse’s partner by circumstance. Jaycee Chan is so earnest and serious as Wai King-Ho that his character seems to verge on parody at times, and is the least believable of the trio. In one early scene, we see him giving CPR to a foul-smelling vagrant without showing any signs of discomfort while those around him are blowing their lunch. He then modestly goes home to his grandma. He strikes you as the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about risking his life to save a bunch of young children on a bomb-laden bus, an opinion that is reinforced later in the film where he risks his life to save a bunch of young children on a bomb-laden bus, oddly enough. Nevertheless, Wai King-Ho is the glue for the partnership of the three disparate cops. He is searching for his brother, who may or may not have gone undercover in the Tien gang. Seeing Jaycee Chan in action is an uncomfortable sensation – seeing someone who is clearly the son of Jackie Chan doing fight scenes brings a weird feeling of deja vu and brings up the inevitability of the passage of time. It sure made ME feel old, anyway.

Wu Jing will be familiar to all who have seen the somewhat over-rated SPL, and many will agree he was the best thing about that movie. One great compliment to this film is that Wu Jing is still great, but he’s no longer the best (or at least the only good) thing about the project. Whereas most Hong Kong action films fail these days to entertain (for me at least) due to a number of reasons, INVISIBLE TARGET succeeds, and a lot of that goes down to a more back-to-basics approach to the stuntwork and action choreography. It still goes over the top occasionally, and some of the wirework doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but the good far outweighs the bad. In fact, after a couple of action scenes I could have sworn they were accompanied by the same tinny, lo-fi synth music that went with all those great 80’s action scenes. Upon rewinding, I found this was not the case, but it’s an interesting association.

The film – at ten minutes over two hours – is slightly too long, but paradoxically doesn’t feel bloated with extraneous material. There are some nice plot turns and interesting characters to root for and hiss at, and a couple of really standout moments. The scene where the gangster explains to Wai King-Ho, without malice or bravado, what happened to his brother and how he felt about it is one such outstanding moment.

So despite being too long and having a corny character or two, Invisible Target is still very much worth a watch, and I’m looking forward to a second viewing already.