This review may contain spoilers
What drugs were they taking to make this?
Man, as I have seen the previous Flying Tiger I knew what to expect from this formulaic series, but I was not prepared for the new depths of suspended disbelief I had to sit through. Many big TVB names are here like Kenneth Ma and Michael Miu, and my favourite wonky canto actor Michael Wong was in it as well speaking in his unique way, but this is all ruined by the inclusion of Lee Pace. Don't mistaken me, Lee is a great actor and has done amazing stuff, but h is completely wasted here in this series. Some scenes with him had me go "what the fish?" because it made no sense, like throwing a can of... I think shaving cream... into a microwave, which destroys a house. That had me laughing so hard! And when Lee Pace's character sees his parents die, the shots to show how sad he was was done so poorly I had to shake my head, and I never do that, and he gets over his parents death so quickly I got massive whiplash. Also, talking about his parents, the terrorists of the drama held his parents hostage so that Lee's character would comply to their demands, but before Lee could carry out any instructions the terrorists kill them anyway, losing any leverage they had on him, and yet he continued to follow their instructions. What sort of writing is that? Man, there is suspension of disbelief, but here you need to be suspended by a cliff to follow this properly.On the bright side, great soundtrack.
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Watched for the cast
Acting: This seems like it was a 2019 big budget production. Star studded cast. Michael Miu can basically get me to watch anything. He is just so good at his cop roles! Bosco Wong also did well too. Poor Ron Ng seems to only get cop roles, but he really does fit the image of a cop well. Kenneth Ma and Kristine Kuo also made a good comedic relief couple (Kenneth also did well in his serious scenes too!). Oscar Leung's acting and character actually moved me the most in this series. A bunch of other veteran actors were all really good (even the villains were hard to hate completely because they played the role so well). You can really tell the acting caliber difference between the seasoned TVB actors and rookie actors (the two female leads). I also have not seen Yoyo Mung in forever! She still looks so young and pretty! I also enjoyed her scenes, but maybe I am biased lol. Also, a lot of foreign actors and a lot of English spoken in this series (Bosco had a lot of English lines and did pretty well in the delivery!).Music: Karen Mok never fails to make good music. Her voice still sounds wonderful after all these years!
Plot: Basic cop drama lol. Sometimes the story got a little muddled because it seems like they were trying to mix too many levels of bad guys in there to make the plot seem dense. The main plot is that a special team is created to combat enemies that are too big for any police department's jurisdiction. This special team is called the "A Team" and is headed by Michael Miu (still as chok as ever). The A Team is very covert and is hidden within the SDU (飞虎队). They basically are battling against terrorists and special agents sent by other countries (so basically international affairs). I think this series had some comedic relief and did better than other cop dramas in fleshing out the romances of the lead characters. But it also made the world seem small because everyone was related to someone (not necessarily blood relation) in one way or another in order to all appear on the same screen lol. The acting was good, but they didn't space out the action and drama logically (ie, an action scene will be cut all of the sudden to focus on a drama piece).
Production: It just got slightly confusing because this series was produced in corporation with some mainland production companies. This meant that some TVB style was limited. There's good and bad to it. The pro is that the production quality increased tenfold, so they didn't have to use the usual potatoes to shoot the entire thing and we get decent special effects. We also get some nice shots of London and more foreign faces (Bobo is no longer playing the only Indian guy). There's also less TVB cheese in the plot line. A con is that the drama obviously has some censorship from mainland now, which was why I was confused for half the series because they used fake country names. You can also tell when they sprinkle in some propaganda about Justice and the HK police department. Minor stuff like that.
Overall: A good watch if you just want a basic cop drama to kill some time. The amazing cast line-up is enough to get you through the basic plot line lol. Not sure how I feel about all the English in the drama yet, because it's not as cringe as when they used to do it, but sometimes it did feel like they put it there as a desperate show of how international HK is (mainly just salty they didn't ask me to play an extra haha).
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