VCD cover

Gen-Y Cops

AKA: Gen-X Cops 2

2000

Director: Benny Chan

Stars: Edison Chen, Stephen Fung, Sam Lee, Maggie Q, Anthony Wong, Eric Kot, Christy Chung, Paul Rudd, Richard Sun

This sequel to Gen-X Cops has Alien (Sam Lee) and Match (Stephen Fung) returning for more hijinks, this time involving a security robot designed by renegade hacker Kurt (Richard Sun) and seemingly stolen by a cop named Edison (played by the epynomous Edison Chen). Of course, the cops don't trust Match and Alien, and so they set out to clear their names and return the robot.

Gen-Y Cops is one of the few sequels which is actually better than the previous film. Granted, I wan't a huge fan of Gen-X Cops, but it was a decent action movie. This movie takes a more comedic turn than the first -- it doesn't take itself as seriously, and, maybe more importantly, it doesn't seem to be trying as hard to be cool -- and, as such, it works pretty well as a mindless action movie with plenty of good eye candy.

I just really wish that HK companies could find better actors for these new "Hollywood-style" movies. It was kind of sad that, for the most part, the gweilos (such as Paul Rudd, who plays a FBI agent) were better actors than most of the Chinese leads. Edison Chen and Richard Sun in particular are horrible -- producers really need to hire actors based on their talent rather than their singing ability (Chen sings the theme song) if they want to build a true international audience for their movies. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon proved (at least to an extent) that western audiences are willing to sit through a movie with subtitles if the action justifies it; more companies should be willing to create films in their native language. Actors who deliver their English lines half-ass (I swear to God it sounds like some of these guys are reading cue cards) isn't going to cut it for too much longer, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Getting off rant mode for a minute, besides some bad acting and a below-average script (no explanation is given on how the Gen-X Cops got back into the police force, or where Nic Tse and Grace Yip from the first movie went to), Gen-Y Cops delivers some good action (I particularly liked the duels between security robots, which is something I've never seen in a HK movie before) along with some funny comedic bits, and makes for a decent night's entertainment -- though, like the first movie, it's not likely something that you're going to rave about to your friends the next day.

RATING: 6.5

Download Edison Chen's theme for the movie by clicking here

A review for the VCD of this movie can be found here

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