From a modest beginning with the loathsomely popular teen series Meteor Garden, director Tsai Yueh Hsun has done well for himself with this high-octane and fast-paced action drama.
Black And White started off, by Tsai, as a Taiwanese action TV series. And he has turned it into a motion picture back in 2012 with so much explosions that the movie has set a precedent for Taiwanese movie-makers.
Co-written by Tsai as well, he has created a thrilling police mystery that gets the audience hooked from the beginning.
Starring Mark Chao as the daredevil police detective with an ironic name of Wu Ying Xiong, translated to "Not A Hero", forming an unlikely friendship with a high-ranking triad member Huang Bo to track down a suitcase of mysterious diamonds.
Chao here reprise his role from the TV series, but as I have never seen that, I wasn't as impress with his performance here as the action hero; because he was always upstaged by Huang. Huang managed to steal the limelight every time he came onscreen. He switched from funny to terrifying or cowardice with such ease and yet never losing his onscreen charisma. He will make you detest him and then feel for him later on.
Yang Ying, also known as Angelababy, played the important part of explaining to the audience just why their mission was so important. She gave a very good performance here as well and I would have liked to see more of her character.
And I'm happy to report that the Caucasian cast used in this movie had more than just there to add diversity to the cast members, unlike what Hong Kong movies love to do (see the previous review of Wong Jing's From Vegas To Macau).
But the storytelling wasn't without flaws. There were quite a few actually, starting with the explosions being louder than the plot points. Many things were left without proper expositions so not everything was explained to the audience.
Midway through, I was even confused as to who belonged to which gang and who was shooting who in the parking lot.
And there was a bad guy with a huge knife that sadly didn't do much damage. It's as if the movie was trying hard to keep to a PG-13 rating so the amount of damage done by said knife was only surface wounds.
Also, Tsai wanted to do a lot in this movie; hence its running time stretched a bit too long for my liking. I could have done without that last plot point which took about 15 minutes. It's as if Tsai was trying to "Hollywood-ify" his movie which made it looked trite instead. It really wasn't necessary.
The next one paragraph may contain potential spoilers so read at your own risk.
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In the final scene with the landing of the 747 airplane, one which also set another precedent as the first plane to be shipped to Taiwan for movie-making purposes, was also not done very well. Many incidents throughout that plot were created to make the scene more thrilling at the expense of the intelligence of the audience, or defied physics.
But all in all, I still enjoyed this movie very much even on the mini-screen of an airplane. And I am definitely looking forward to Episode 2 (The Dawn Of Justice) which is currently in post-production.
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