Review: When I first heard about Wesley's Mysterious File I was thinking wow an actual HK sci-fi mystery thriller type movie, this is going to be something good. Sci-fi is an unseen genre in HK and I was hoping for some way cool action that only HK cinema can deliver. When reviews of this movie came out they were bad, or better said terrible. I did not want to believe it, how could such a good movie concept fail. Janick was telling me that it took everything for him to not hit the fast forward button while watching this movie. He assured me that this movie did not even fall into the "so bad its good" category, I guess there was no hope, I braced myself for the worst and watched the movie.

After seeing this movie I've come to realize that HK doing sci-fi may not be the best thing. What experience does HK cinema have with sci-fi? None at all, so how can they make a good sci-fi movie then. Unfortunately this movie pretty much fails on every aspect not just on the genre. The storyline in this movie is scattered all over the place, there is no focus. It is as if they were trying out different things and then gluing it all together into a plot that goes in all directions. The sad thing is that if they would have concentrated on one aspect of the story and develop it you would have an interesting movie.

The most elaborate part in this movie is the sets, you have a lot of shiny and fancy secret installation places that may look sci-fi-ish but did seem convincing. Now that I think about it everything had a sort of fake feeling about it in this movie, not to mention the terrible wannabe technobable. The came the CG, it stuck out like a sore thumb and it's really over used. CG might look incredible in certain situations but I sometimes feel that its use is just cheap, basically saying we have no skill or resources to do it actually on film so we'll draw it on computer and put it on afterwards. Still on the topic of realism and convincing I found the acting lacking motivation. This movie had a great cast but I think they were lacking direction to really bring the performances alive. There are some scenes where it almost looks like the actors are reading their lines off a piece of cardboard behind the camera. Poor Shu Qi, she had several lines to say in english and I don't think she knows any english at all, she really had a hard time saying her lines.

So if all else fails HK still turns out great action right? Not in this movie, the action scenes were just lame, none of the usual HK style. There were tons of gunfights in the movie involving SDU forces (SWAT) but there was no life to it. Even some of the scenes of mass swats dying were recycled in the editing. There was also a great deal of CG used in various action scenes, it was not interesting and added nothing to the movie. It was easy to spot many of the western sci-fi influences in this movie. One of the most obvious was Terminator 2, and also MIB. At times I think the story was changed so these explicit inspirations could be added thus making the story the mixed mess it was.