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2002 (2001)

Dir: Wilson Yip

This is an enjoyable but ultimately flawed HK flick that seems to have been overlooked....

Tide (rather dishy Nicholas Tse, who seems to have fallen off the handsome tree and hit every branch on the way down) is the one-Man member of the Paranormal dept in the HK Police Force. He has the ability to see ghosts.
His partner is his dead...er...partner named Sam (Sam Lee).
Sam was accidentally shot by Tide and has since been his ghostly sidekick, and together they take on evil spirits or help 'lost' ghosts.

Tide is cursed though. He is fated to cause the death of any person he touches, making him a loner.

To battle the ghosts Tide is armed with a special gun that has a needle in the trigger. When fired the needle pricks his finger, takes the blood into the gun where it coats the bullet just before it leaves the barrel. This can 'destroy' the spirits.
He also has phials of liquid that when thrown at a spirit makes them solid and visible and halves their power.

It is time for Sam to move on, and so Tides mentor/ghost/burial expert 'Paper Chan' (Kar-Ying Law) tells him another partner will be assigned to him.
This turns out to be Wind (Stephen Fung), an eager Traffic Cop.

Little does Wind know though that he is fated to die (to become Tide's new ghost helper)...a matter made worse as love enters the lives of the two men. Wind falls for a young Woman in a coma and Wind for a Nurse at the Hospital.

To add to the trouble a vengeful 'Water Spirit' (Alex Fong) is out to get Tide and Wind for destroying his ghostly girlfriend...............

Made in that flashy, ultra cool way that HK film makers excel at (Tide's entrance, all black clothes and flapping leather coat is a cheesy joy) this shows how much the budgets have increased in the last ten years in HK cinema.
Some flawless CGI and wire work mixed into the fights makes this a far cry from the 'real' Martial Arts days, but given the other worldly subject matter the fight effects never annoy.
A battle in a pool between Tide and the 'Water Spirit' is wonderfully handled, as is a very enjoyable battle in the Police Station, where 'Paper Chan' (following a great entrance) builds weapons out of cane and paper, at super fast speed, and burns them. A wonderful bit of Oriental strangeness where you can 'pass' objects to ghosts by setting them alight. Hence a paper sword becomes a real sword in the hands of a ghost.

There is also a welcome seriousness to the subject of death. Two sequences in particular are memorable. Where a shocked Wind finds out about his fated death, and especially a sequence involving the ghost of a child who is waiting for his pregnant, but dying, Mother to join him in the afterlife before moving on and the grieving Father left behind.

But sadly there is also some very lame humour. As with most comedy in HK films a lot of the humour here does not only not translate (literally) but is so broad as to be wildly out of place. That Wind becomes paralised with fear, as in really, completely unable to move, paralised, results in a rather bad scene where Tide has to garb him by the shoulders and drag him out of the building!

The film also piles on the emotional cliches too often. A montage of scenes during the finale showing the friendship between Tide and Wind (all scored to a dreadful rock ballad sung in broken English) is cloying more than genuinely emotional...in total contrast to the sequence with the dead child and his Mother.

The end is also rather confusing (unless I missed something.... Please feel free to Email me if you can help) as the Tide's 'curse' seems to have been either ignored, magically lifted, or forgotten. Something that happens to Tide may explain why the curse has gone...But if so it's never explained as such.

Overall this is a crisp, professional, sometimes exciting and emotive movie let down by too many bad comedy moments and overuse of the good old emotional cliches.