The Last Chance

This was one of the many video's i found way bk in the day at a 2nd hand old video store called Enterprise, such a Cool place to find obscure & rare films & they had sections of video's by the actors name so Robert Patrick had his own section & that was too Awesome in my eyes as I've been a huge Robert Patrick fan since T2 & FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2:TEXAS BLOOD MONEY & really wanted to check out other Patrick films & i found in the Awesome Robert Patrick section HONG KONG '97 & ZERO TOLERANCE!!!! Both good pure 90's action Thriller's but the Awesome vigilante flick Zero Tolerance is the better of the two but hey it was so good to discover two films where Patrick was the action lead!!!! Also stars other B film greats such as Brion James (Nightmare at Noon, Southern Comfort) Tim Thomerson (Nemesis, Dollman) & Andrew Divoff (Wishmaster, Blast) all often star in Albert Pyun films.

Hong Kong '97 Was pretty good in it's Albert Pyun Directed DTV low-budget quality as the Cult Director always puts plenty of style & slow-mo action on screen for us & he does do plenty of Cool action scenes & shootouts with Robert Patrick looking very Cool in his long coat with two hand guns jumping around capping bad guys & Pyun does this greatly & has many moody music sequences that adds an emotional element to the action scenes.

Patrick is a hitman on an undercover mission over in Hong Kong & of Course nothing is as it seems & he's hunted by many bad guys with guns & we get a low-budget "John Woo" style action film that yes can be cheesy but it's entertaining & is exactly what it's supposed to be an action B-movie Thriller with a Cool lead in the underrated Robert Patrick who usually gets bit parts in big films & very rarely gets to headline a movie!!!!

Patrick blew me away with how great he was as criminal Buck in the fantastically fun & ferocious DTV scuzzy sequel From Dusk Till Dawn 2, a real gem for us Horror fans & full of crazy action & bloodshed & put Robert Patrick in the limelight as the movie's hero character & from then on i was a huge fan & he became one of my all time favourite actors ever.

This is an easy watching action flick with plenty of style & Coolness & a very good Robert Patrick doing plenty of Action, i love B-movies because it gives our other fave actors a chance to lead films & be the main character for once.

It's 1997 Hong Kong and the last days of British rule. Reginald Cameron (Robert Patrick) is a hired assassin who kills the incoming Chinese leaders of Hong Kong. He is hunted in the city and finds refuge with his ex-girlfriend Katie Chun (Ming-Na Wen). His mentor Simon Alexander (Brion James) and friend Jack McGraw (Tim Thomerson) try to unravel the murky conspiracy surrounding the kill order.

This is a poor B-movie. It's surprising to see some interesting actors. It tries to build up the exotic aspects of Hong Kong. The action is a lot of functional shoot em up but there is nothing extraordinary. The tension is never that high. I also don't find an assassin who kills a high Chinese official that believable when he's shocked at all the trouble he's in. I rather have him be a harden killer who expects all the danger.

I like Robert Patrick even if I have realized that he is not the best actor this world has seen. This movie is a kind o slow-moving action flick with a lot of over-exaggerated shooting. Brion James portrays a good guy if you can call a assassin that's in problem for that. Tim Thomerson is a big failure in this movie and so is also Andrew Divoff (see Wishmaster instead). I gave it a 4

I rented Decoy and this flick one night as a Robert Patrick double bill. Hong Kong 97's story would seem to have potential, but nothing comes of it. Robert Patrick stars along a bunch of recognizable faces (some b-movie regulars) that have seen better days in the typical gun-for-hire on the run / can't trust anyone routine.

I still remember when Hong Kong was going to revert powers. It was almost surreal. All British assets were clearing out and the news was portraying it as the 90's version of the Berlin Wall. Of course, this movie has none of that underlying paranoia or sense of unease. It's just a bunch of cheaply filmed scenes helmed by Albert Pyun. For fans of direct-to-video action, this doesn't register a blimp on the radar and even Robert Patrick fans will have to agree Hong Kong 97 is pretty sore.

This film is not an academy award winning film, but I am tired of people putting it down such as other films by Robert Patrick. I rented this when it first came out and I did not think much of it, along with Decoy and other Patrick films before his x-files years. Yet what I have come to realize is that these films capture a time and feeling which we just don't see anymore. B-films have become no-talent video filmed crap movies that are as bad as anything you might have seen on MST3K more then a decade ago. Looking back on these films such as Hong Kong 97 makes me wish that independent film companies still gave financial backing to these visions. Is this movie bad? No! Can it be better? Yes. Is it worth watching? Certainly!