Early in Line Walker 2, a hard-bitten Ching To tells his mentor that he is an “old school” cop. Here’s one movie that’s old school as well. Filled with bravura action sequences and over-the-top sentiment, it evokes the “heroic bloodshed” genre of the 1980s, only with plenty of nods to modern-day franchises like Mission: Impossible.
While three of the leads and much of the crew return for Line Walker 2 (officially Line Walker 2 Invisible Spy), it’s more a variation on the earlier movie and TV series than an actual sequel. Director Jazz Boon takes the premise of the 2016 title and turns it inside-out, imagining entire new identities for its characters.
The focus remains on cops who may or may not be on the take, a cornerstone of Hong Kong thrillers since the Infernal Affairs trilogy almost twenty years ago. Line Walker 2 opens in the Philippines in 1987, where best friends and fellow prodigies Tsai and Dee are kidnapped from a day care center by terrorists. Dee escapes, but Tsai is taken prisoner to be raised as a child soldier.
In present-day Hong Kong, a financier kills five pedestrians before committing suicide, all to protect his family from terrorists. After rescuing journalist Yiu Ho Lee (Jiang Pei Yao) from another terror attack, cop Ching To (an excellent performance by Nick Cheung) suspects she knows more than she’s letting on. She’s about to bring up the child soldier scheme when Cheng Chun-Yin (Louis Koo), a cop from a different branch, takes over her case.
Ching’s boss Yip Chi-Fan (Francis Ng) battles Cheng and bureaucrats over who should handle the case. As a result, both Cheng and Ching are sent to Myanmar to recover the journalist’s missing computer files.
A mole tips off the bad guys, leading to a shootout on city streets that even in the age of Marvel blockbusters is simply jaw-dropping. Boon and action director Chin Ka Lok rely heavily on practical effects, bringing a gritty realism to the stunts. The stunt team and the stars as well take a lot of hard hits. There are traces of the Bourne movies in the camerawork (by Jason Kwan and Jimmy Kwok Chun Ming), but Line Walker 2 has its own style and sensibility.
Screenwriter Cat Kwan (a veteran of the first movie) is familiar with Mission: Impossible as well, introducing a top-secret “Invisible Frontline Force,” or IFF, with an underground headquarters and improbable tech gear. But the espionage plot line is just window dressing: Line Walker 2 is about how trust and love between two damaged men outweighs everything the world throws at them.
It’s a theme John Woo used in movies like The Killer and Hard-Boiled, and if Line Walker 2 never quite reaches their heights, Boon does a surprisingly convincing job resurrecting Woo’s world for a contemporary audience. You can’t quite shake off the absurdity of Ching and Cheng fighting knives, bullets, bombs, and in a delirious Spanish climax, ferocious bulls to prove their love for each other. Or the immorality of an inexhaustible supply of bad guys to up the film’s body count.
But when a granite-faced Koo faces down a grinning, leather-clad killer named “Demon,” or when Cheung shoots handguns with arms outstretched like the Chow Yun Fat of old, action fans may feel like they’re back in Hong Kong heaven.
Well Go USA releases Line Walker 2 August 16.
