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Despite having a limited understanding of English and despite being saddled with a dumb screenplay and a director just graduated from music videos, Chow Yun-Fat still manages to rescue this derivative attempt to insinuate Hong Kong action movies into the American psyche. Yun-Fat does it with charisma. He is the only actor working anywhere in the world that has the old-fashioned movie star charisma of the great Hollywood stars. He is a combination of Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum, and Cary Grant, an actor capable of anything. It's too bad he isn't given much to do here after an electrifying introduction at the movie's opening. In this one sequence, Chow trancends the material through sheer force of cool. He isn't an actor or a character, he's a force of nature.

Chow isn't asked to do anything more to rescue this knock-off of The Killer, but his mere presence is up to the task. The story ostensibly places Chow back into his character from The Killer, a noble assassin given a task that his honor will not allow him to complete. His superiors hire "replacement killers" for the job and to take out Chow. Bad move, really. Much gunfire ensues. Bad dialogue, silly set-pieces, pretentious lighting schemes, and a co-star who seems to be on completely different pages of the script cannot overcome the man's raw screen presence. One wonders, given the service Yun-Fat provides for this movie, what might happen when he finally reunites with John Woo. If Woo had directed this movie instead of merely producing it, this might have been one of the classics. As it is, it merely hints at the career one of the great movie stars enjoys outside the gaze of the American audience.