My Father is a Hero

Veteran action director Corey Yuen-kwai and martial arts icon Jet Li Lien-jie, the team who brought you the dynamite The Legend of Fong Sai-yuk, join forces yet again for this new, modern-day adventure that, despite some haphazard plotting and over-reliance on soap-opera melodramatics, should prove to be a good time for action fans. Li stars as a kung-fu fighting mainland cop who has been ordered to infiltrate a gang of nasty Hong Kong criminals and bring them down. But the years of undercover work have, not unlike Tony Leung Chiu-wai's character in Hard-Boiled, left Li's family life in shambles. Both his disease-stricken wife and young, but equally capable, son (New Legend of Shaolin's Tse Mui) are in the dark about his true identity. But when determined Hong Kong cop Anita Mui (Heroic Trio) attempts to dig up the details of Li's past and eventually brings Li's son from the mainland to the Island City, she accidentally brings down a house of cards that blows our hero's cover and leaves him fighting for his life and that of his son. My Father Is a Hero (fire whomever came up with that ludicrous English title) benefits mainly from the reprising of Li's and Tse Mui's natural “father and son” chemistry in their previous hit New Legend of Shaolin, as well as a number of well-staged action sequences (a violent shoot-out in a restaurant and a kung fu battle in a rain-soaked alleyway are particularly memorable), but there is an unevenness at work here that keeps the film from reaching the delirious heights of this dynamic duo's previous collaborations.