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| Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung in Wild Search |
Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Cherie Chung, Roy Cheung, Paul Chun, Chang Cheuk-yan, Ku Feng, Tommy Wong, Lau Kong, Frankie Ng, Elaine Jin, Wan Yeung-min. Screenplay: Nam Yin. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Art direction: Luk Tze-Fung. Film editing: Chow Tung-Nei. Music: Lowell Lo.
The chemistry of the romantic pairing of Chow Yun-Fat and Cherie Chung gives Ringo Lam's Wild Search enough heart to lift it above the routine Hong Kong action movie. Not that Lam is ever routine in his staging of action, but the likability of the actors and their characters make the film feel like it's more than just gunplay and cars and bodies in motion. Chow plays a cop named Lau but nicknamed Mew-Mew (we never find out why), who gets involved with Chung's character, Cher, when her sister, Elaine, is killed by gangsters muscling in on the gun-smuggling business Elaine's antique shopt is fronting for. A witness survives the gunfire, Elaine's small daughter known as Ka-ka (Chan Cheuk-yan). Mew-Mew meets Cher while interviewing Ka-ka, and things escalate from there in both attraction and action. There's a vicious hit man called Bullet (Roy Cheung) to contend with, along with Ka-ka's grumpy old grandfather (Ku Feng) and a rival suitor for Cher's hand, her ex-husband (Lau Kong). Mew-Mew is more vulnerable than many of Chow's characters: He winds up in the hospital after one encounter, but he's very much on hand for the final blazing shootout. Much has been made of Wild Search's resemblance to Peter Weir's 1985 hit Witness, but the movie is more homage than plagiarism.
