Denim clad rascal on a crotch rocket Wah Dee (Andy Lau) is chosen as the getaway driver for a jewelry heist doomed by convention to fail and when it does Wah takes a wealthy college student (Taiwanese actress Wu Chien Lien in a star making role) hostage in order for the gang to make their escape posthaste.

To the shock of perhaps everyone involved once clear of the authorities Wah simply returns his captive to her residence ultimately causing more chaos than the actual robbery.

By turns "A Moment of Romance" is hackneyed and mawkish; the film might have made for Hong Kong's most expensively produced karaoke video with the good girl falling for the bad boy paradox set to Fabio Carli and Lau Dai-yau's mellow tunes. But writer James Yuen lends the film a sense of brutal realism: Lau's Wah Dee is a boy raised by wolves and whether he finds love or not he is first and foremost married to the streets that raised him and he will eventually die on them as he lived.

The film's unpretentious nature is perhaps why this occasionally gooey Stockholm Syndrome romance; occasionally visceral triad drama has withstood two decades of competition, imitation (not the least from its own producers), and parody.