Cheung (Shawn Yue) is a rookie cop, traffic division, who just loves
his job - mainly because hegets in many a car chases attempting to stop
reckless drivers. Because as a cop, Cheung might be inexperienced, but
he's an excellent driver. Of course, because of that he gets reprimanded
for reckless driving quite frequently ... Jiang (Guo Xiaodong) is a
seasoned getaway car driver, and his skills are second to ... only one,
but more about that later. Jiang's latest job is to break Wong (Li
Hai-Tao), master robber, from jail for an especially daring heist. To
achieve that, Jiang has his muscle car impounded, then (in a lesser car)
he forces Cheung into a carchase - at the end of which, he lets the young
cop arrest him, to be thrown into the same jail as Wong, a rather low
security place next to the car park his muscle car is kept. Wong and Jiang
shoot their way out of there, then they engage the whole police force in a
car chase. At the end, only Cheung manages to not be shaken by Jiang -
until in a narrow street, Jiang takes a corner that's impossible to take
by any normal driver, and he this way humiliates Cheung. Cheung leanrs
that of all people, his harmless retirement age partner Lo (Anthony Wong
Chau-Sang) is the only one whose driving was on par with Jiang's - but his
driving got him into hospital, and then he lost his drive. Cheung can
persuade Lo though to teach him. Wong wants to meet with his gang, but
it's a police set-up, which leads to another car chase, in which Cheung
gets involved in an accident, which causes Lo to take the wheel after all
those years - and he's doing pretty fine too until his car flips over, and
the crash ultimately kills him. Even though the police obviously knows,
Jiang and Wong decide to go through with their daring heist, which leads
to of course another big car chase which destroys many a police car, kills
many a cop, but this time Cheung proves to be unshakeable, and ultimately,
with everything Lo has taught him, he manages to lure Jiang and Wong into
a fatal crash ... On the surface, Motorway seems to be
pretty simplistic, and it doesn't even try to shy away from many a genre
clichée, not always to the film's advantage. But at the same time, Motorway
is a quite impressive movie, not only because of the many expertly staged
and adrenaline-pumping car chases, but also because the film understands
the philosophy and the fascination behind them, because it treats them
like a ballet at times, at other times in a tongue-in-cheek way, at one
time even in a romantic sense of way ... in short, it puts actual life
into scenes that often come across as impersonal demonstrations of
brilliant stunts (or of late as proof what CGI can and cannot do). But
besides all of this, even though the film has nothing new to offer on a
narrative level, it's hell of a fun to watch ...
|