4 February 2000 | Life! The Straits Times

The best thing about 2000 AD is watching some of the familiar locations in Singapore being turned into an arena for the struggle between good and evil.

You may not quite see Suntec City in the same way after you have witnessed all the "blood" that was shed there.

Neither will you able to dine in peace at Boat Quay without imagining that a car might hurtle in your direction and run you over.

Shot in Singapore and Hongkong, 2000 AD stars the manga-faced Heavenly King, Aaron Kwok. He plays a young man whose brother gets killed by members of a covert organisation bent on wreaking havoc across Asia using the Y2K bug. (Hello. It's February 2000. Obviously, no one informed the producers that the movie should have been released before its plot became dated.)

In any case, Kwok gets involved in the conspiracy when he tries to avenge his brother's death. With the help of a Singaporean agent (James Lye looking sour and woeful), his goofy best friend (the customarily stiff Daniel Wu) and girlfriend (the sugary-sweet Gigi Choi), he tracks down the killers from Hongkong to Singapore, where the final confrontation takes place. Along the way, he becomes confused over who is really on his side.

Director Gordon Chan, whose Beast Cops last year (1999) garnered him the Best Director prize at the 1999 Hongkong Film Awards, is clearly at home with the genre and shows flair for the action sequences.

The scene where Kwok's brother is killed is particularly stunning.

When the action moves to Singapore, however, the film loses some of its fire. The shooting sequence in Boat Quay, for instance, is not quite as seat-grabbing as in the Hongkong scenes, while the number of firearms used seemed to be less.

Still, Chan is good at drawing even performances from his mixed cast of Singaporean, Hongkong and Taiwanese actors. Lye and TCS actress Phyllis Quek look particularly right for their parts and hold their own against their better-known counterparts from Hongkong.

The only odd performance comes from Lim Yu Beng, who plays Lye's boss at the Information Warfare Unit. For some reason, the actor, known for his police ah-pek role in TCS' Triple Nine, speaks more loudly than anyone else in the movie. His expansive brotherly gestures also seem strange and out-of-place.

Ultimately, the strength of the film lies in Chan's adept direction. Despite the challenges of handling a multi-national cast, he pulls the right tricks from his bag and rounds off the film deftly.