There was some outstanding stunt work at the end, and some really good fights scenes, but that was all there is.The irritating Coolio completely played over Mark Dacascos (Cradle to the Grave). The constant jive just wore thin after five minutes.Aaron Kwok was good, and Japanese model Norika Fujiwara really kept things interesting, but not enough to recommend the time spent.Lee-Hom Wang is proving to be really good, and in recognition was in Lust, Caution.If you want to see real action, there are many better films to check out.

I sought the movie for my Mark Dacascos collection, and because of him I watched it all the way through. The scenes he's in are solid, and (of course) his fists and footwork are the icing on this otherwise dry cake. The movie begins very slowly and seems disjointed. You have to piece together plot elements which is unfortunate because a little bit more effort to include the viewer would have improved the flow. The places where you get a break from that feel opportunistic and thin. There is a feeling that the characters are just trying to get to the next action sequence, and those aren't well-timed or particularly powerful. Everyone in the film is visually interesting, but the backdrops seem opportunistic and static, and the stunts often look like the evening news, shot too wide and far away, never sharp or startling enough to rouse. Kwok looks like he's really trying to find a character in there somewhere; he's likable and the bits of banter that occur between Darren (Kwok) and his partner Alex make you want to see their efforts succeed, but it's just too little spread too thin and nobody else is acting like there's room for humor in the scene. Mark Dacascos is top-notch with what he's given. If you like how he moves his presence through a scene, using his skin, eyes, those long elegant hands, you'll appreciate his sense of proportion here. He brings the film a sense of solidity when he's in the frame and offers the only intimacy in the venture, using his eyes to evoke it even though his character is aloof. Coolio wields a brutally candid hood mentality charm, pulling no punches with his brazenly observant racism. I found it refreshing and palatable - it's aimed at everybody, even his old friend Tony Lau (Dacascos). His abrasive drama plays well off Dacascos' polished and saturnine hauteur, but the two of them aren't enough to carry a film about "two other guys and some other stuff"... and that's exactly what this feels like. The action scenes are slow, and shot from less than optimal angles. There are ways to shoot people who look this interesting ( Andrezej Bartkowiak and Christophe Gans both know how to put a camera on Mark Dacascos), and with the abundance of attractive personages it's too bad that didn't happen here. I was hoping for another Cradle 2 The Grave, something that surprised my mode of thought and shook up the mix, that had punch, pride, and balance. I was sorely let down. Even so, I give it four stars out of ten, all of it due to Mark and Coolio. If you want to watch a movie that goes where this one doesn't - see Cradle 2 the Grave for some good-looking people, broken stereotypes, nice dialogue, fine music, and superb acting by DMX. If you want mystery, lyrical execution, passion, and art with your kung fu - see Crying Freeman for its beautiful dialogue and provocative tone set by Gans' shooting and Julie Condra's amazing voice flowing throughout. Mark Dacascos is in them both, for all the right reasons.

I saw this movie at an asian cafe and I can honestly say, this is one of those few movies that can elicit an entire room full of people to tearful laughter just for being so bad. While I have to admit that I didn't pay very close attention to the first half of the movie, the near-nekked back shot of one of the antagonist got my attention (*cough cough* =P) and thanks to the tepid company I had at the time, I decided to watch the rest of the movie. It's essentially a very typical "Hong Kong Action Flick" (TM) with the helpless girl, the foreign baddies who speak English, and the protagonist with a good heart. A million bullets, ten cringe-worthy lines (at the very least), and a hundred thousand explosions later, everything is solved of course and everyone goes home nice and happy. Brainless, easy-to-follow entertainment, not bad after a couple of beers I would imagine, but being as I was ENTIRELY too sober at the time, I would say that the only reason I didn't run out of the cafe was because I was having too much fun laughing at their understanding (or lack thereof) of physics. Motorcycles slamming into walls with heroes flying into the air are just a tad too much for me to take and the entire cafe reverberated with laughter for five minutes after, and given this cafe was populated by geeks, explaining just WHY it was impossible. No duh. Nevertheless, it's an action flick, so check your brains at the door and enjoy this movie for all it's testosterone-y goodness. It doesn't get much worse than this (speaking as a female of course), but then, why would anyone expect it to be better? Besides, watching Coolio try to act is just as hilarious as anything else. 2/10 (1 pt just for the sauna scene)

CHINA STRIKE FORCE is the poster child for the disastrous attempt the Hong Kong film industry made in the early 2000s to achieve more "international" appeal - notably to sell the film to US markets, which is why it is filmed in English, but you also have a Taiwanese singer and a Japanese model in the cast to try to appeal to those markets. This kind of calculated marketing driven film-making process is just not what Hong Kong film-makers do well (leave that to Hollywood boys), and the result is a grand disaster of a film that I can't imagine appealing to *anybody*, whatever their nationality.The primary culpit is the script, which fleshes out a paper thin and utterly generic plot with terribly inane dialogue, delivered in poor English by a cast for who the language is mostly not a natural choice (and I include Coolio in that :p). As a result it's hard for the acting not to be utterly dreadful, even if the cast *were* made of people who actually could act in their native language. I'm not sure how the spurious racism sprinkled through the script was meant to increase international appeal either.The film's one saving grace is the action scenes, which Stanley Tong *does* know how to direct. There's a few moments of greatness to be found in these scenes, especially the finale set atop a pane of glass precariously suspended hundreds of floors above the ground (for whatever reason). This scene is almost worth the price of a rental by itself. If the film had just been a string of action scenes like this it might have been a significant guilty pleasure, but unfortunately these scenes are too few to really redeem an otherwise awful film.