Film Review: Moscow Mission 莫斯科行動 (2023) Hong Kong / China 🇭🇰 🇨🇳
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia 🇦🇺)
Recent Chinese cinema has made the 90s a priority for all the crimes related events being showcase in a cinematic fashion. One to educate the public of the past wrongdoings and two to show how much the country has progressed to date. Veteran Hong Kong Director Herman Yau is good at creating gritty environments and this time on a larger scale. Based on the true historical crime story in 1993 where a series of violent armed robberies occurred on the K3/4 international train connecting Beijing and Moscow. This involved Chinese police travelling to Russia to conduct investigations to bring back all the robbers to China for punishment.
Andy Lau is clearly no longer the leading man he used to be, whilst hard working and charismatic, he is unable to convince as the mastermind. Lau plays too safe to be a villain and far too good an image to become any than fighting for justice. Luckily the film main stars goes better in the form of rising mainland star Huang Xuan (fresh of several popular TV dramas) as the key dimensional villain. Xuan ranges from charismatic to talented to simply bad as his character goes thru an infernal of deeper emotions. Janice Man does well in a paper thin role, showing much needed elegant in a brutal crime thriller setting.
All in all, “Moscow Mission” works best when robbers are robbing the trains, as these scenes shows the helplessness of individuals as well as the mentality of the robbers and their wrongdoings. What’s bore the film down, are scenes involving Andy Lau, who simply brings the story to a standstill and despite given a character arc to care for his long lost daughter, it is never really truly convincing. That’s a shame as Herman Yau crafted a decent enough film to showcase an era where these crimes existed and crossed boundaries.
I rated it 6.5/10