Film Review: Connected
Reading the Wikipedia article on Connected makes us laugh: it says that director Benny Chan tried to make the characters more “real and believable” than the Hollywood film Cellular, of which it is a remake.
Though we haven’t seen the original if Connected is “real and believable” then Star Wars might also be loosely based on a real story. Barbie Hsu (widely known as Big S) plays Grace Wong, a single mother who gets kidnapped, along with her school-age daughter, on account of something her brother did. The baddie is played by Chinese actor Lou Ye, and the hero by Nicholas Koo. The movie unfolds when Grace is able to patch together an old phone in the place where she is being held and make a call to Koo, who must now decide if he ought to save a stranger in distress.
There are some half-decent action scenes and good car chases, and the whole thing is not meant to be realistic, but even so, there is just something amateurish in the way the movie was crafted. Nick Cheung’s performance as the good cop that smells something fishy in all these proceedings hits the right notes, but in the end, it is only Koo’s performance that manages to (barely) rise above mediocrity.
