High Forces

Story: Gao Haojun (Andy Lau) is a security expert and suffers from bipolar disorder, which is why one of his fits of rage indirectly leads to a car accident in which his daughter Xiaojun (Zhang Zifeng) loses her eyesight. Years later, he has no contact with her, or so she believes, but in reality he continues to care for his family from afar. His wife (Liu Tao), on the other hand, secretly keeps in touch with him. By chance, the three of them take the same plane, the maiden flight of a new Chinese company, with the CEO on board. After the plane takes off, Mike (Qu Chuxiao) and his accomplices take control of the plane. He wants to extort 500 million dollars from the CEO and is not afraid to sacrifice everyone on the plane to get it. In fact, the pilots have already been eliminated, and he has no intention of landing the plane anywhere. Instead, he and his accomplices plan to parachute out as soon as the money has been transferred, leaving the remaining passengers to their fate. However, Hao-jun can tell that something is wrong before the entire plane has been taken over. So he sneaks away and is able to eliminate some of the hijackers one by one. He also gets hold of the parachutes, which gives him excellent leverage. Unfortunately, Mike is unscrupulous, and if he finds out that Haojun's family is on board, things could get more than uncomfortable for the security expert...

Review: It would be a lie if I said I expected a good film from Oxide Pang. He and his brother may have produced entertaining films like "Out of Inferno" in the past, but after I watched "The Detective 2" he had lost my interest. Accordingly, I was somewhat surprised to be presented with an obvious blockbuster along the lines of "Die Hard" starring Andy Lau. The end result is a film whose script insults the intelligence of every living being with an IQ higher than the average age in the world. Beyond that - and at least the film doesn't fool us in this regard right from the start - "High Forces" can be extraordinarily entertaining. Yes, 80s action cinema (in a modern guise) paired with B-movie charm shines through here, and the fun factor shouldn't be ignored despite all the criticism. Maybe, if someone other than Andy Lau had been in front of the camera, the film might not have been considered as high-quality in some areas, but let's face it: the flaws are enormous.

If you want to have a good time with "High Forces", you have to be prepared for the fact that coincidences that advance the story in a predictable way occur every other minute. It starts with our hero taking the same flight as his wife and estranged daughter because an important meeting fell through, and continues with him acquiring a walkie-talkie toy with a robot voice distorter, the counterpart of which, of all people, his daughter accidentally got from two children playing. Of course, the two don't know who the other is at first, and the way Haojun finally gets it is so sudden that you have to wonder if you've missed something plot-wise. But no, this is simply one of those screenplays where the writer makes the story the protagonist who plays by his own rules, without any need for character motivation or logical cause-and-effect principles. Unfortunately, I don't mean the kind of karma that characterized, for example, 90s Hong Kong cinema. As a viewer, you should quickly turn off all the lights in your head, otherwise you won't be able to bear the sight of all this stupidity.

Let's move on to the hero of the story. Haojun has bipolar disorder, just like the villain. Both are on medication for it, but anyone expecting any kind of depth here has only themselves to blame. Every now and then, there's a red filter when anger gets out of hand; green, of course, puts everything back in check. What exactly this is intended to achieve remains a mystery. Was it meant to humanize the villain, along the lines that he's not really to blame for his cruelty? Hardly. Haojun's illness doesn't play a role either; his outbursts of anger aren't that strong. Presumably, the screenwriter and director needed an explanation for why Haojun accidentally stole his daughter's eyesight during a fit of rage when he wasn't on medication. A profound drama revolving around guilt, redemption and forgiveness would certainly have been possible with these ingredients, but instead we get an incredibly intrusive musical theme that makes it clear in every scene between father and daughter that the two actually still love each other and will find each other again. Oh yes, there is also the mother, who is not angry with her husband in the slightest, but always supports him.

But let's get to the action before we have to worry about why the daughter — maybe because of her blindness?!? — is unable to change her facial expression even slightly during her tearful scenes. Actress Zhang Zifeng probably thought that if she did, you wouldn't be able to see that she was staring into space and was blind. Anyway, as mentioned, the action can be really fun. While there is the small problem that Andy Lau ("Cesium Fallout") is now 64, it's a shame that Oxide Pang felt he had to make 30 cuts per action scene, like with Liam Neeson, so his age wouldn't show. Lau can still pull off some impressive moves and perform some stunts himself here, though, which makes this decision annoying. At least it's not quite as bad as it might sound, and the action boasts a surprising amount of violence. Our hero doesn't just aim to incapacitate the villains, so that there is the risk of them waking up again; no, he eliminates them forever! Unless it's really important for him to kill them, in which case, of course, he leaves them unconscious — after all, that's what the script demands.

The airplane as a setting, with its various eye-catching rooms in the business class section, is used profitably for the "Die Hard"-story. Qu Chuxiao ("The Wandering Earth") plays the one-dimensional, merciless villain astonishingly effectively, and the action packs a serious punch. Anyone who could barely stomach the nonsensical script until the finale is in for a surprise, because that's when "High Forces" really goes off the rails. Several people are hanging from the plane by ropes, and at the end, the plane — and that's a point of honor — of course still has to be landed. The only problem is... No, I don't want to give away any more, because it gets so ridiculous that you'd better see it for yourself. The fact that the special effects of this "blockbuster" unfortunately repeatedly reveal the green screen and CGI, especially during the showdown, should really be a deal breaker, but anyone who has stuck with the movie this far simply because the whole thing is such an insane stupid fun ride will regard it as the icing on the cake. "High Forces" is objectively not a good film, all critics will agree on that, but if watched at the right time and with the right expectations, you can have a lot of fun with it.

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