Black And White: The Dawn Of Justice | 2/5

SINGAPORE — Here is a movie filled with non-stop, mind-numbing, Die Hard-meets-Jackie Chan type of action scenes. But a story with depth, it is not.

Black And White: The Dawn Of Justice is the big-budget second prequel to the 2009 Taiwan television series Black And White, which stars Mark Chao and Vic Chou. But only Chao returns this time, reprising his role as the unrelenting police officer Wu Ying-xiong (which literally means “hero” in Mandarin). With the help of his arrogant and annoying partner (Lin Geng-xin), Wu battles the inexorable villain mastermind Lan Xi-en, played by director Tsai Yueh-hsun, who is bent on bombing and destroying the fictional Harbour City and all of its inhabitants.

The main problem with the movie is its unnecessarily complicated plot. The film stars so many actors — including Huang Bo, Ning Chang, Terri Kwan, Shiou Jieh-kai, Christopher Lee and more — some of whom only appear for one or two scenes, that it becomes difficult to keep track of who does what in the city and what exactly is happening. The villains’ motives for laying siege to an entire city, and for murdering thousands, are also not adequately convincing.

Fortunately, action buffs will find that there is no real need to understand the details of the story to enjoy the movie. Complicated as it is, the movie is also simplistic in that it really isn’t all that difficult to figure out who the good and bad guys are. The villain in particular screams “bad guy”, with his unkempt long hair, menacing grin and inexplicable penchant for speaking like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises — a consequence of human testing by evil scientists in the military, apparently.

Black And White: The Dawn Of Justice is entertaining, but only if you are willing to close one eye to its convoluted story and sometimes overly dramatic action sequences. But really, we’d rather just stick to Marvel movies.