Motorway (Soi Cheang, 2012) Hong Kong

Reviewed by Mitchell Schena. Screened at the Metropolitan 4, Santa Barbara.

Motorway takes the American style of fancy driving and crazy get away scenes, and places it into a Hong Kong environment. Director Soi Cheang, told an interesting story using the camera in order to express the intensity of the pursuit of Hong Kong’s most talented driver by the local police. When you put amazing driving skills and a criminal mindset, you get the perfect get away driver. Make elusive turns and long drifts, the driver escapes more than just one situation where the audience thought for sure the police had him.

We begin by being introduced to Shawn Yue, an up and coming officer who goes out of his way to catch the driver who got away. Starting as a talented driver, Yue gets in the first of many pursuits with the thieves and fails to apprehend the criminal numerous times. After many hours of practice, wisdom and knowledge shared by elder officers, Yue soon enough grasps the courage to chase the driver yet again.

The film had an “okay” plot, and by okay I mean not as interesting as I thought it was going to be when I was first walking into the theatre. The entire story somewhat focuses on the challenge and difficulty of one sharp turn. Not the much of an exciting challenge, at least not intriguing enough to hold my attention. After quickly getting bored with the plot, horrible special effects, and impossible driving scenarios, I gave up hope to enjoying this film. I would not recommend this to anyone. It’s a basic cop chase robber film that doesn’t contain many scenes that really pulled me into it.

The acting I’d say was so-so, not really great or up to my standards to what I expected of this Hong Kong production. The emotions of Shawn Yue were somewhat hidden and were hard to connect with his character because of the last of passion in the acting. What also turned me off in this film is the predictability of the movie and obvious scenes that were gong to come next. Not the best movie I’ve screened so far at this festival.