Viral Factor

There was a time not very long ago, when movies from Hong Kong meant one thing : "ACTION" sometimes an overdose of it. But regardless of the naysayers, they were quiet brilliant at it. But then they grew either too frivolous or too serious and sometimes too pretentious for their own good. Dante Lam (one of the better ones out there) in the face of this gradual change has earned himself a name for sticking to his "guns"; literally. & if the experience of his latest offer is anything to go by, the trend may just catch up again. I for one will not be complaining.

The GOOD : This potentially could be the most accomplished HK "action" movie in a contemporary sense of the word and setting. There have been a few masterclasses but most of them are either from the age of the Kings & Queens or of characters with super powers (yawn inducing). "The Viral Factor" does not have any gravity defying stunts nor does it have a single shot which is used to glamorise the protagonist or the antagonist. With all due respect to Donnie Yen, considered the best action man in town and my favourite too, there have been too many caricatured villains in his movies. Nothing like that in TVF. Its bare knuckles, blood splattered walls, rusty nails / water pipes, plenty of body bags, big guns in extended street chase sequences, car crashes, rocket launchers, helicopter chases and the list goes on. You absolutely have to give it to the director for his no holds barred approach from start to finish. He does not pretend its anything else. The leads Jay Chou & Nicholas Tse, have done a fantastic job and quite possibly have produced their best work yet. Chinese lads are not known for histrionics but some demanding & long single shots have brought out the best in them. Nicholas Tse in my book has grown to be in a different league compared to his "Dragon Tiger Gate" days and character.The story although not a pathbreaker has a sense of nobility in it with a platform for a large spectrum of emotions. The almost unseen city skyline that of KL (in a movie before this) is used as a backdrop and that adds on the rare but tingling after taste that the movie leaves. I was very curious to see how it'd turn up and its fair to say I am mighty impressed as I have lived right in the middle of almost all the places the story evolves through. The BAD : The screenplay does not do any huge favours to the story and is the biggest let down of the movie. It stands as the biggest deterrent to what it could have been. Mostly because, the 2nd n 3rd acts which is the glue that holds the end to the start tends to give a convoluted feel. There is nothing wrong in the story, but the sequence of events and there by its impact could have been spot on with some crisp writing. The editing leaves a little to be desired coz if that was snappy, TVF could have been an immortal piece of ACTION cinema. All these also mean that the runtime could do with some some chopping. Another sore point of the proceedings esp. for the non English speaking crowd, is the amount of English used in the script. Some of them were necessary and fits well. But I could not digest the main baddie delivering almost all his lines and most importantly the ones that mattered to the eventual development of the story, in English. And if it counts at all, I don't speak Cantonese or Mandarin nor understand 1 bit. Considering this is predominantly aimed at the Chinese with a more than liberal approach begging the westerners to pay a visit, the subtitles alone would have sufficed.

The FINAL WORD : Its recommended for the action fan. Go and have Yourself a great time at the theater. One of the best ways to kick off a new year.

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A team of military special forces are escorting a scientist and his family in the Middle East when they are ambushed by terrorists, intent on taking the scientist's work on a genetically engineered super-strain of smallpox and using it for their own private financial gain. One of the operatives receives a bullet in the head, but declines to stay in hospital to recuperate, instead heading off to Malaysia to look for his estranged father and the brother he never knew he had. As luck would have it, this course of action brings him back in contact and indeed conflict with the terrorists.

Hong Kong does not typically do hi-tech action thrillers very well, and terrorists seeking super-viruses is certainly a red flag when it comes to a Hong Kong movie. The smarter Hong Kong's scriptwriters try to make their characters sound, the dumber they usually come across, and this is no exception. Additionally, credibility-stretching coincidences are rarely a hallmark of a well-written script. One incredible coincidence which becomes the centre-piece of the story, exploring how the effects of random probability or the hand of fate can transform a person's life, can make for an interesting story and film. When your hi-tech action thriller introduces at least 3 unbelievable coincidences in an attempt to make your story about super-viruses seem more coherent, you should probably realise you've taken the wrong track.

In short, the script for The Viral Factor is a mess... ridiculously, eyeball rollingly so, really. The annoying thing is that it's all quite unnecessary... at its heart there is a story of two estranged brothers that have found themselves on opposite sides of the law, but who have to cooperate to protect their family and see if they can find forgiveness and redemption. The implausible coincidences don't really add anything to that scenario, and the whole terrorists with super-viruses aspect is basically not needed, too. They're plot devices that speak of a weak writer, one who feels that the simple motivations of family, love, guilt and redemption just aren't enough to engage the viewer... when in fact they're the only parts of the script that do.

Somehow, the glaring flaws in the story do not derail The Viral Factor nearly as much as you feel they ought to. The writing is awful, but pretty much everything else about the film is good. Dante Lam's direction is strong, the performances from Jay Chou and Nic Tse are good, visuals and production values are excellent and the action scenes are top calibre. Some individual scenes are well written and executed, and there is generally a lot to like about the film. Generally, the further the whole 'Viral Factor' aspect is pushed into the background, the more engaging and enjoyable the film is - and for much of the running time it is indeed relegated to the background.

If Lam had had the confidence to just excise all the hi-tech espionage type fluff and focus on the emotional core of the story, he could have made a great film here... though admittedly he'd have robbed himself of some excuses for staging some quite remarkable action scenes (though I'm sure he'd have found a way). As it is, I guess he can take some credit for managing to produce a pretty solid film despite the self-imposed handicap of a ridiculous script.

One of Hong Kong's rising film directors, Dante Lam has gained prominence over the last few years for his lavishly produced, hard hitting cop action thrillers underlined by thick melodrama between the main characters. His latest film The Viral Factor is obvious in having Lam's signature plastered all over, that this could be Dante's spiritual interpretation of John Woo's A Better Tomorrow with brothers on opposite sides of the law having to put aside their obvious differences to work together against a common enemy and goal.

The story bore some shades of intention from Woo's Mission: Impossible 2, where a virus got created to hold the world ransom at the breakout of an epidemic. In The Viral Factor, this comes in the form of weaponizing a variant of the smallpox virus, where a corrupt pharmaceutical company had employed thugs to obtain one of the last remnants of the virus, and to fund both its viral nature, and to come up with the medicine and the vaccine, thereby earning itself billions in profits, and adulation from the world for its cures. Talk about being both the devil and angel at the same time, and making tons of money from it.

With Dante Lam and Ng Wai Lun sharing screenplay responsibilities from a Candy Leung story, The Viral Factor soon has this premise put on the back-burner as it focused instead on the brotherly bonds or the lack thereof between international cop Jon Wan Fei (Jay Chou), introduced through his dream of getting yanked out of trouble by an invisible hand, and that of perennial robber Wan Yang (Nicholas Tse), a consistently wanted man in Malaysia who commits the largest of crime, and with the backing of corrupt cops, almost always finds a way out of either the court house or the jail. With the Beijing based cop learning from his Mother (Elaine Jin) about her wanting to seek forgiveness from his dad (Liu Kai-chi) and brother for walking out on them, Jon makes the trip to Malaysia to track them down, despite nursing a "bullet-in-the-head" injury that decided to rear its ugly head only during flights (for product placement purposes), or when it's plot convenient.

And it is in Kuala Lumpur that the film spends significant time in, with Jon finally reconciling with his dad, his brother amidst under testy situations since both come from different sides of the law, and getting themselves in the way of the villains led by Andy On in full typecast, who are all after a scientist Rachel (Lin Peng) who has the skillset to weaponize the virus, and Wan Yang's daughter who gets captured as collateral. The two brothers have little time to get to know each other since a number of tasks get put in their way that requires plenty of shoot- em-ups to complete, but given this is a Dante Lam film, he'll craft enough emotional scenes in between for the building of camaraderie, and one of the better dramatic moments come when both brothers have to hide at an abandoned construction site and open themselves up, one who's brought up in Malaysia thus very fluent in Cantonese (thankfully and curiously the censors here allowed this to be in full and without dubbing), and the other conversing in Mandarin only. Some may find this a little bit unbelievable, but trust me I'd just appreciate that Nicholas Tse wasn't dubbed over.

I would liken Dante Lam to Hollywood's Michael Bay for his penchant of blowing things up, and almost always featuring some of the latest toys in weaponry for their characters to gear up and use. From the get go in Jay Chou's scene in Jordan where his extradition of a doctor and his family goes awry no thanks to an ambush, it's full on military mode and precision as he tackles this sequence, and every other action sequence later, with craft to rival the best of the West. No doubt some scenes may be overly long and indulgent just to showcase what Lam can do, repetitive even, but amongst his filmography The Viral Factor demonstrates just how Lam has continued to improve upon his action delivery. And what makes him stand out is the insistence to focus on the human emotion, so that his characters don't pass off as one dimensional and having an emotional void.

Jay Chou has come out to proclaim that this would be his final action film, but to that I'd say never say never. He's more of a singer than actor, although I have to admit he does have screen charisma and have progressed quite nicely from his rather wooden outing in Curse of the Golden Flower. Nicholas Tse on the other hand shows why he's top dog now, with that ability to balance the more dramatic moments and holding his own during the action sequences. His acting has developed from when he first started out, relying on his "idol" looks and poser attitude then, to grow into a bona fide actor now, with some of his best work done under the watch of Dante Lam.

It's a surprise to have lined this up for the Lunar New Year since this is a period for comedies and family friendly entertainment, but if you're in the mood for some action, The Viral Factor lives up to expectation despite minor plot quibbles and loopholes and underlines Dante Lam's ambition and capability to helm large action spectacles, with the promise of more to come.

Having just sat down to watch the 2012 action thriller "Jik Zin" (aka "The Viral Factor") for the first time ever here in 2022, I will have to say that the narrative in the movie was somewhat confusing and chaotic. It felt like writers Dante Lam, Candy Leung and Wai Lun Ng were writing independently of one another and the end result was a mash of random scenes filmed and put together.

The storyline in "Jik Zin" was simplistic enough, but there simply were too many things being crammed into the storyline, which cluttered up the narrative flow unnecessarily. And the end result was a somewhat botched narrative that felt incomplete and in disarray. Running at 122 minutes, the movie is long, so very, very long to sit through, especially with all the things crammed into the storyline. When the movie was about to come to an end, I checked the run time, and I was only 55 minutes into the ordeal, but at that time it felt like I had been spoon-fed enough contents to fill up two movies.

There is a lot of action in "Jik Zin", and it is definitely that action that keeps the movie afloat and keeps it being a watchable movie. So if you enjoy fighting, chases, gun fights, etc. Then director Dante Lam doesn't disappoint with "Jik Zin". If you are looking for a properly enjoyable action thriller storyline, then "Jik Zin" is not the best of choices.

The movie has a good cast ensemble to help make the movie stay afloat as well, with the likes of Jay Chou, Nicholas Tse, Andy On and Kai-Chi Liu.

Sure, "Jik Zin" was watchable, but it was by no means an outstanding movie experience. I doubt that I will ever return to watch this movie a second time.

My rating of "Jik Zin" lands on a mediocre five out of ten stars. If the movie had a more focused storyline and narrative, and they had trimmed out all the cluttering elements, the movie would have been a far more enjoyable one.

The plot is all over the place and you shouldn't worry about it, because it will pull the fun out of your viewing pleasure (if you can call it that). It doesn't make much sense most of the time too, so just try to get on that ride and enjoy it while it lasts. While I do like Asian action cinema in all its variety (be it from Hong Kong, South Korea or Japan), this one does not have the strength other movies do. It is too simple (though it tries to be complicated) and light for its own good most of the time.

The actors are actually good, but I can't shake the feeling that they weren't comfortable with the script either. But the action scenes do not disappoint, which is why I gave it that rating. Still with a bit of emotional power behind it, it could have been even better.