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Simply Perfect

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Messy form over content police thriller (comedy?) has a cop, who is trying to come to terms with a long missing girlfriend, lose a witness in an organized crime case to an assassin. How the cop, the girlfriend and the assassins all interrelate is the film. I didn't know whether director Benny Chan was serious or not. Chan a good director (New Police Story) for the most part though occasionally he tries to do too much and the pieces don't come together (Rob B Hood). Here nothing seems to work and it all seems like a TV movie. The action isn't real, its done for artistic effect- the early strangulation where the victim claws the paint of the truck for example.Whats worse its laughable- the sequence where our hero finds the picture of his lost girl in his car and takes his foot off the brake while on a steep incline had me howling. Actually I just gave up on the film and jumped to the end. For me its one of the real disappointments I've seen recently, even if it does have a couple of good sequences-the plastic bag fight for example.

The movie Divergence is about three men who have their lives brought together by their jobs. The movie makes it seem like there will be some very profound and mind-blowing brilliant connection among these characters when there really isn't. However the movie does create an interesting dynamic with the jobs of the three main characters, and how each character takes on the job of another (I won't spoil it for you). The characters have a good amount of development and its likely you'll make some sort of connection with Aaron Kwok's character at the very least. The action scenes are good, definitely better than the usual fare from HK recently. The cinematography of the movie really impressed me, if you pay attention there are a lot of subtle things that are done to foreshadow things in the movie. The director really knew what he was doing. The rating that the movie has right now (floating around 5.5) is definitely too low, this is an entertaining movie and impressed me since I have been a little indifferent to HK cinema recently. At the very least the this movie shows their is still room for the thriller movies in HK, despite the recent barrage of brainless comedy flicks.

Just like its Hollywood contemporary, the fabled jewel of the east, also known as Hong Kong, shovels mouthfuls of filler in the general direction of its loyalist audiences. And similar to fluff done anywhere else, HK's variety also comes in the irritating form of polished, well-supervised products with at least acceptable technical merits and yet little beyond.We recently had two mega-stars like Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung suffer through mediocre episode Jiang Hu, further thrashing the over-strained underworld genre, and here comes a Benny Chan flick to additionally burden the cops and crooks theme with uninvited baggage. At least in Chan's case the memory of capable actioner New Police Story still lingers, so we'll forgive him the helming of Divergence and its, in essence, vacuous content and pretty embarrassing conclusion. You'd be right in expecting more from Chan and his writer cohort Ivy Ho (who previously penned classic July Rhapsody), but nonetheless both failed to come up with any worthy goods this time around.Presumably, Divergence gets its moniker from the three main personages operating inside the film's confused and unfulfilled promise. Suen (Aaron Kwok) is a sarcastic police officer working various, rather high-profile cases, at least one of which we witness going bad with the baddie under Suen's protection buying the farm in a gruesome fashion courtesy of the second main character, a hit-man known simply as Coke (Daniel Wu, who lost some weight and much appeal in a role that's beginning to smack of typecasting). Coke's success and Suen's misfortune set in motion a series of events that supposedly want to point out the ironic nature of life, the universe, and whatever the people counting box office returns happen to report.The terminated criminal Suen was sheltering leaves a mean triad boss (Gallen Lo) feeling a whole lot better about things, but ultimately lands everyone in more trouble since the latter's enemies soon move to equalize by retaliating against his family. This sort of complication doesn't make Suen's life any easier as he tries to focus on capturing renegade Coke and his sultry female accomplice (done by mainlander Ning Jing). Defending the underworld elements is attorney To Hou Sung, done by our favorite hunk Ekin Cheng, and here completing the triumvirate of male leads. Although silent and reserved, To quickly gets on Suen's nerves, and not just for his application of the law as an excuse for things one would sooner sweep under the floorboards. There's another element figuring in, further showing us how intertwined the trio is and why even minute occurrences can have repercussions much later down the line, hence Divergence. The factor in question is naturally a woman, and one who perhaps has been missing for the better part of a decade. It's the apple in the eye of cop Suen, an ex called Fong, portrayed with minimal gusto by gorgeous Angelica Lee. The disgruntled cop obsesses over his former lover and her vanishing all those years ago, even though we don't see much of their relationship other than contrived, hokey memory sequences and Kwok's miserable cry fest moments as fortified with extra-dumb instances of pseudo-animalistic howling. Was there really a need for such mundane clichés?As if that wasn't enough, someone had the brilliant idea of encumbering Suen with several idiotic attempts at self destruction, resulting in him miraculously surviving and changing cars about as often as you do socks. Must have been quite the improvement in HK auto insurance since we last looked into the matter. Plus, the music people, bless their souls, thought it prudent to include one of the cheesiest collections of sentimental overtures one has heard in a long, blissfully quiet time. It's all enough to make you reach for the hurl bag.And as we sit through the travails of Suen and his struggle with shadows of the past, it becomes apparent none of the main characters gets enough space to mature and grow, thus the various pieces never click. This trickles down to supporting figures like Ning Jing and too-prolific Eric Tsang as a jolly, noodle-slurping police medical examiner who never loses his appetite no matter how grisly the stiffs. Ha ha but not all that funny, thank you.Not even the action itself lives up to whatever high expectations you may have of this project, if any. Fighting's pretty lame and basic, there's little gunplay, and the car chases seem to use the same beat up Mazdas you've seen in scores of older HK movies. But probably the biggest disappointment comes when the thing finishes, with characters coming out of nowhere to reach an easy, convenient and utterly ridiculous ending that somehow explains the various "enigmas" you were supposed to fuss over during the plot. But of course there was no fussing at all, seeing as how can anybody care about a story lacking in so many departments to begin with? At least for Divergence Angelica Lee looks her best yet, so for all thus inclined mayhap there's some incentive to watch yet. On all other counts, Divergence misses the mark big time, leading down paths of inadequacy any film buff needn't even consider following.Rating: **

Considerably better than movies in the same genre such as director Benny Chan's own recent New Police Story, "Divergence" would still come under the categorisation of "flick" in my book, albeit a fairly good one. One reason would be Ivy Ho's ("Shore West") script which is usually reliable. "Convergence" apparently is her first "macho" screenplay. The mission is to tie together the stories of three men, each at a cross-road, played by Aaron Kwok, Ekin Chang (sort of reunion of the Wind-Cloud duo from Storm Riders) and Daniel Wu, through a woman played by Angelica Lee. On the whole, the job is quite well done, with a reasonable degree of coherence, although it is not difficult to point to logical gaps, predictability and coincidences that really stretch one's imagination.At the end of the day, this is still an action flick, but one with more emphasis on the story line and character depiction. Some of the action sequences still reach jaw-dropping proportions, such as Kwok chasing Wu on the elevated freeway in the middle of brisk traffic, or a massive truck coming literally within inches of Kwok's body lying on the road. All these become even more impressive when you hear director Chan intimate in a radio interview that Kwok did not use any stunt replacement for these shots.Trying to keep this report spoiler free, I wouldn't delve into the characterisation other than saying that there are generally good efforts, with varying results. I would say though that TV superstar Lo Kar-leung outshines the three principals, while talented Angelica Li is underused. As usual for Hong Kong movies, the ensemble of "regular" supports is always a joy to see. In Divergence, we have Lam Suet, Jan Lam Hoi-fung, Sam Lee Chan-sam, as well as inimitable Eric Tsang Chi-wai. There's also Ning Jing showing her worth by demonstrating that she is just as alluring in her shaved head.