At The Movies: The Shadow’s Edge a reunion of Jackie Chan and Tony Leung Ka Fai ruined by bloat

The Shadow’s Edge (NC16)

142 minutes, opens on Aug 16
★★☆☆☆

The story: A crew of thieves with extraordinary technical skills has the Macau police baffled – the criminals can evade the authorities’ state-of-the-art Sky Eye surveillance system. The cops decide to reinstate cyber-intelligence expert Wong Tak-chong (Jackie Chan), an officer who left the force years ago under a cloud. He forms an elite team that includes He Qiuguo (Zhang Zifeng), a young woman with personal reasons for joining the police force. The team realises that its target is Fu Lung-sang (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a criminal who has evaded capture for years.

The two giants of Asian cinema, Chan and Leung, cross paths every few years. The Hong Kong actors were in the prison action movie Island Of Fire (1990) and fantasy-adventure The Myth (2005), and The Shadow’s Edge marks their third collaboration.

Tragically, their combined star power does not make up for this movie’s aimless bloat.

There are too many cliches to count, but the one that does the most harm here is the idea of the infinitely powerful hacker, the one on Fu’s heist team. Impenetrable shield meets unstoppable spear – every vault is set up as undefeatable, only for it to shatter with a few taps of a villain’s keyboard.

Yes, cyber-heist movies have a right to exist, but no amount of loud soundtrack, rapid-fire edits and swirly camera moves can hide the lazy screenwriting.

Digital omniscience creates storytelling loopholes and paradoxes that good movies exploit and bad movies ignore.

For example, if crooks have the power to control every street camera and therefore foil any form of surveillance, the technology itself would be much more valuable than loot from any robbery. Why steal from a Macau casino when governments and spy agencies will pay billions for the tech, legally?

The story is set up as a battle of yin and yang. Fu and Wong are veterans – one is a wily fox and the other a wise bloodhound. They are on opposite sides of the law, but are mirror images in their regrets and miseries.

There might be a solid two-hour movie here with just Fu and Wong playing a bullet-strewn chess game across the picturesque streets of the former Portuguese colony, in the style of emotional crime thrillers like the Michael Mann classic Heat (1995).

Instead, the two men play father figures to groups of 20-somethings, creating another source of bloat.

Writer-director Larry Yang, who worked with Chan on the commercially successful drama Ride On (2023), does what he can to make the family drama work within the context of a high-tech crime thriller, but the strain shows.

The inclusion of eye candy like Zhang and Ci Sha is a deliberate attempt at youth appeal – and there is no harm in that – but the clumsy sentimentality of their scenes do the Chinese actors no favours.

As fans of Chan’s martial arts work had hoped, he spars in The Shadow’s Edge, but the excitement fizzles out in fight scenes that feel inorganic to the plot and, worse, go on ad nauseam.

Hot take: Chan and Leung deserve a tighter script than this saggy cyber-heist story.