4 February 2000 | The Business Times

Things move so fast in 2000 AD that its cast gets lost amid all the mayhem.

RAINTREE Pictures' third film, 2000 AD, marks the local production company's first real step towards international collaboration -with Hongkong's Media Asia films -and a regional market.

But it's not just a business tie-up; 2000 AD, directed by Hongkong's Gordon Chan, scripted by American Stu Zicherman and featuring talent from Singapore, Hongkong and Taiwan, is also an artistic collaboration.

The resultant film is pretty slick and action-packed, but very predictable. The movie aims for complexity with a large cast of players, and movement between Hongkong and Singapore -but the result is a sense of clutter rather than twists or real surprises. And you actually have trouble tracking the storyline because of the number of characters and action scenes.

Visually there's lots of eye candy. At the Hongkong end is Peter (Aaron Kwok), who lives in a ditzy world of computer games with friend Benny (Daniel Wu). Peter is happy to drop an extra $10,000 just to jump queue for the latest robotic toy dog -a lifestyle paid for by older brother Greg, a Y2K-solution programer based in the US.

At the Singapore end is top military officer Eric Ong (James Lye), who is sent to Hongkong with a watching brief after the mysterious explosion of an airliner over Hongkong and the Singapore Air Force finding a latent bug in its new Y2K software. Also representing the cops are CIA agent-gone-bad Calhoun (Andrew Lin) and HK police officer Ronald (Francis Ng).

Greg's bloody assassination following an espionage charge brings the players together, amid situations dominated by chattering guns and bullets. The newcomer to the fray is Salina (Phyllis Quek), who is supposedly Greg's grieving girlfriend, but has "mystery woman with an agenda" written all over her.

The good guys and the bad guys rush around from Hongkong to Singapore, creating mayhem in the name of stopping mayhem.

The potential threat would appear to be a Y2K computer program that can be downloaded to destroy every bastion of contemporary Singaporean society from stock markets to hospitals. One assumes the baddies intend to hold the Singapore government to ransom with this program, but intentions tend to get a bit hazy in 2000 AD.

For the Singaporean audience there's bound to be some fun, as in Anna And The King, in picking out familiar faces from the local scene, not to mention familiar locations.

Local star James Lye seems very comfortable in his transition to the big screen. However, his character isn't really given anything much to do, apart from offering mint pastilles to his co-stars and chasing people around.

But that's the problem that plagues most of the characters in 2000 AD -they aren't fleshed out enough for us to really care about them. And on the whole, activity tends to overwhelm the plot.