Peace Breaker is the Chinese remake of the critically acclaimed 2014 Koren smash hit A Hard Day, and follows the original's plot faithfully, so anyone interested may want to check that out, as I won't put any spoilers on the plot here.
As a way of circumventing the rigid Chinese censorship, the entire story is set in Malaysia, a country with a large ethnic Chinese minority and where Chinese is among the official languages, instead of in mainland China. If anyone wonders, certain major story elements (police corruption, drug dealing, generally portraying a city as a fairly dark place) would make it difficult if they were set in a mainland city. Perhaps for the same censorship reason, a flawless positive mainland cop character is put in the film and is played by a handsome actor, but the character is unfortunately paper thin and uninteresting. Setting the story in HK would pose different problems, such as having everyone speaking in Cantonese which would be unappealing in the mainland market.
Aaron Kwok and Qianyuan Wang both gave stellar performances. They are simply the bread and butter of the film, and I can't imagine this film without their notable acting. The supporting cast is actually the weakest part of the film, as the characters are both under-written (some with terrible Chinese TV opera level dialog) and uninspired. TV-presenter-turned-singer-turned-actress Liu Tao plays Aaron Kwok's wife, but her acting is no match of her on screen husband and this is painfully obvious in almost every scene they appear together in. The technical departments have done a good job, and the script obviously benefited from the brilliance of the original, and the localization added plenty of working humor into the story. Overall, this is a fairly solid remake.
7/10
