Based on the Japanese anime Supernatural Beastie City, Wicked City is set some time in the future when human society has been infiltrated by an alien race known as the Raptors, a lizard-like race that can assume a human form. The Raptors' old leader wants to live in peace with the humans, but his hot-headed son (Roy Cheung) won't have any part of it. He wants the Raptors to continue their ways of killing humans and taking over key companies and governmental agencies to eventually destroy the Earth. In response to the rash of killings caused by the Raptors, an underground group of special agents have been set up to try and stop them. Jacky Cheung plays a rookie hotshot who has a particular distaste for the Raptors after his family gets snuffed by them. Joining with veteran agent Leon Lai, they are the best at their job -- wasting Raptors with no vengeance. Things get mixed up for Jacky after he meets a Raptor (Lee) that he falls in love with. He realizes that not all the Raptors are evil and has a crisis of conscience, especially when Roy Cheung steps up his plan with a slew of bloodshed.

To begin with, I must say that I admire Wicked City. While HK was being deluged with John Woo wannabes and slapstick comedies, Tsui Hark (who also produced the movie) decided to try something different and attempted to capture the feel of an anime in a live-action movie. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work. For starters, Wicked City has a very weak script. Little explanation is given for the plot and the characters' actions -- and when it is given, it's weak. As such, the audience develops no sympathy for the characters and really doesn't care about where the story is headed.

Another sticky point is the look of the film itself. It's well-known that HK movies' budgets are a fraction of Hollywood films, but even so, Wicked City just looks cheap. Perhaps the filmmakers took on too much responsibility in trying to create an anime style to the movie, something that was only really completed successfully in Hong Kong with 1998's The Storm Riders. At any rate, cheap rubber monsters still look like cheap rubber monsters. There are a couple of good-looking sequences (helped by some early use of CGI), but the film's low budget is painfully obvious throughout the film.

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