Watched Dragon Squad (猛龍) today. You can watch the trailer here. The movie overall was quite fun, though I thought the side stories were a bit too much. In short, it’s about a team of 5 elite police officers from different countries forming a team, but… well, read the spoilers to find out more. After reading the credits, it turns out this movie was actually co-produced by Steven Seagal. *shivers*
While watching the movie, I had several thoughts. I’ve seen kidnappers chop off fingers and ears of their kidnappee and send them to the people they are ransoming as a warning. One question that popped into my head was, people can still hear without their ears right? So I messaged several friends: If your ear was cut off, you can still hear right? Just not as loud since you dont have that satellite dish thingy to direct waves into your ear hole. Most of them believed that was the case. Human ears are shaped almost like a parabola to get the most sounds. If you’ve done any geometry, you’ll know that a parabola directs all incoming lines into a focal point which is our ear hole or ear drum in this case. Our ears aren’t exactly the shape of a parabola, so I wouldn’t say it’s the most efficient, but it does a pretty good job.
One scene I thought was hilarious was that the chief was running with a cigar in his mouth. At first I couldn’t figure out what the thing in his mouth was since he was jogging and the camera couldn’t really focus, but as he came closer and closer to the camera, I was like OH! I just couldn’t really imagine someone running with a cigarette or cigar in your mouth. It’s like eating while exercising where it’s complete opposites.
Spoilers:
Movie starts out introducing 5 elite officers from different countries bringing in evidence to pin a international crime lord. However, during delivery of the crime lord to court, the police were ambushed by a team of elite veterans, also from different countries. However, they weren’t rescuing the crime lord, but this crime lord had a brother (another crime lord dealing in drugs and arms) that had something that belonged to them. As a gift to the brother, they sent him his ear (hence what sparked the discussion above).
The remainder of the story is about these 5 elite officers trying to catch this team of 5 elite veterans. Somehow their chauffeur comes into play and turns out to be the chief back in the days and after his entire team dying (sorta like in New Police Story), he went into a slump and was lost for many years. He finally came back, but would only do the little stuff like being a chauffeur.
Though neither of the teams seem that elite when they were facing each other. With over hundreds of gunshuts, no one would get hit nor wounded. And it was pretty much only a few feet apart. The ending was a bit weak too on how the elite team got tricked so easily and splitted apart. I’d have to say the ending was a bit rushed.
The choreography was nicely done and it was pretty fun watching it. It had a mixture of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English which was nice. For some reason, it really felt like New Police Story, but not as pretty nor as good.