A movie with an English title as ludicrous as this must have something going for it! In fact, the Cantonese title (literally: "Top Marksman and Curry Chicken") is equally inept, so I suppose whoever picked the English title rightfully figured "Why not just go nuts" and came up with an instant classic...

In any case, the movie itself is actually a fairly good example of the ever-popular buddy cop genre, with some exceptional acrobatic gunplay that easily measures up to anything found in some of John Woo's best HK offerings. Unfortunately, I was only able to watch the second half of the film, for reasons that still leave me a little bewildered: When I tried to pop vcd disc 1 into my player, the disc literally cracked into two parts in my hand!!! Maybe I am actually a master of the Cracking Fist style and simply never realized my own power, or maybe it was some fluke accident or a quantum fluctuation (somewhere there's a universe out there where the disc didn't break and I'm actually enjoying part 1 of the movie...), whatever the reason, my player decided it can't read a disc that is actually two half discs so I was stuck with being able to only watch the second half of the film.

However, the good thing is that once you're familiar with genre conventions, you don't need the first half of the movie. So I was able to immediately get into the movie, despite not really knowing who was who. It all seemed familiar enough, just like any buddy cop movie with Dragon or Tiger in the title... Jackie Cheung hammed it up, Lam Ching Ying looked cool in a non-Taoist role, and lovely Loletta Lee provided some eye candy. Also, the big showdown is in the final reel, and that's really the raison d'etre for a movie like this. The flick doesn't disappoint, the last 20 minutes are a superbly staged shootout that features plenty of acrobatic gunplay of the finest calibre.

The vcd is atrocious (and not just because one of the discs cracked). It's one of those cheap Ocean Shore discs with horrible picture quality and an intermittant Ocean Shores logo popping up on screen. Add to that the fact that the film is shown in fullscreen and the extremely unreadable subtitles are consequently cut off on the sides of the screen, and you have the recipe for an extremely unpleasant viewing experience, mitigated only by the fact that the movie itself was enjoyable.

I'll give it half a thumbs up.