Operation Golden Job

Golden Job from director, action choreographer and stunt man Chin Kar Lok is somewhat a homage to the HK action flicks of the golden years while at the same time suffering from a basic storyline, silly script and typical Chinese film CG - that could have worked so much better in real life!

That said - flaws and all - I was quite entertained with it all. It was great seeing the now mature cast of Young And Dangerous back together again alongside director and star Chin, with the wonderful Eric Tsang and surprise supporting roles from the great Yasuaki Kurata and Billy Chow...

While the story itself was typical of a late 80s/early 90s HK flick, it did lend itself to some fantastic set pieces with nicely choreographed action and gunplay - particularly the last action scene which I found to be great fun!

While far from perfect - with one big let down for me being the lack of martial arts fighting Kurata had, and the same for Billy Chow. I hadn't seen him in anything recent for many years and most of his action scenes were done as gunplay...

I did like Golden Job. Although I caught it on my plane journey to Hong Kong, I'd be quite happy to watch it again on a bigger screen and hopefully appreciate it a bit more.

Hopeful next time, director Chin Kar Lol will lay off the CG and guns and give us some good old 80s style HK martial arts we all really miss!

I gather Golden Job is some sort of sequel to an earlier series of Hong Kong action pictures. It's glossy, well-produced and like the very similar The Adventurers, was mainly filmed in a variety of European locations. It's like an oriental blend of Ocean's 11, with the more recent remake of The Italian Job, with a lot less plot and far more, (predictable) seen before, highly choreographed action scenes.

The acting from the very much male dominated cast is strictly cardboard, run of the mill. The women folk are very much shuffled to the sidelines to get out of the way of the boys having fun and creating much chaos with their big, fancy toys. I think there are only 2 tiny roles. One is of a rather silly girl, who later becomes your regulation damsel in distress and the other is a do-gooder of a doctor working in an African village.

The narrative tries to be multi-layered but is clearly faking it and simply exists to allow us to move between action scenes. All I can further add, is that I really hope the calibre of Golden Job isn't indicative of the quality of the earlier films. I think I'd prefer a dose of John Woo's 80's and 90's material any day to this derivative, generic product.

So overall the movie is good,, it has a nice plot , maybe i got a bit confused at first , because i was trying to know exactly which language they speak , Mandarin or Cantonese then they spoke Japanese somewhere mixed with English here and there so i think it confused me a bit but nonetheless the Action and explosions were extreme but good ,, the script was okay digestible and somewhat easily followable .. the CGI and visual effects were spot on for once ,,

The cast did good engaged well ,,, and at the end when things got emotional the did well too.

as i said at the beginning it might get a bit too extreme for you with all the overdosed action and explosions but the story is worth it.. Recommended.

These Hong Kong actors are like Hollywood's Rat Pack, a group likes to stay together not just on the screen but also off it. These guys are the mid older generation actors, but none of them is actually talented enough to be called "great actor". Now, they are becoming older, even past their prime, but together, they have the powerful influence in Hong Kong's movie business.

By the over-the-top settings covering Europe and Japan, lot of exotic cars smashing, crashing lot of buildings, interrupting the traffic wherever they shot those car chasing and gun fighting scenes, the production budget obviously was so big, but sadly, it was developed on a weak, loose, and ridiculous messy screenplay, scenarios and plots, extremely cliche'd. Typical Hong Kong style but like these actors, it's not a good enough, matured enough movie, so formulaic and one-way predictable, no matter how much they spent on the special effects, CGI graphic and stunt coordination.

The worst part in this movie is their Cantonese dialog, a quite ugly dialect that simply lack the seriousness what a suspenseful action thriller should be even with the good English or Chinese subtitles.

A great action movie performed by Chinese actors Asian movie is at a high level. Only artificial cars explosions are offended, you can see it with the naked eye. Shooting and fighting look more truly. I highly recommend it! Worth watching.