CUSTOMS FRONTLINE - Mark Reviews Movies

Customs Frontline, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024

A vast conspiracy, involving illegal firearms and internal traitors and a war between two African countries, unravels in Customs Frontline. The backdrop is the work of Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department, which is responsible for tracking all shipments being made in the region. The job must be difficult, given Hong Kong's seaside geography and its hundreds of islands, but by the time director Herman Yau's movie reaches its destructive climax, one gets the impression that the job mostly entails lots of shooting, chases, and daring stunts. There'd probably be plenty of paperwork to fill out after just one of the action sequences here, but such details would simply get in the way of Yau's goal.

We're used to such simplifications and exaggerations of law enforcement work by this point, and Yau, whose career in the Hong Kong film industry stretches back almost four decades, definitely knows what we expect from an actioner such as this one. What's frustrating about this particular exercise in justifying as much action as possible is that the setup also promises something a little more thoughtful. The work of the characters here isn't founded upon taking down assorted bad guys but in something more akin to investigative work.

That, at least, is how it's initially portrayed in Erica Li and Eric Lee's screenplay. A ship that was intended to arrive in Hong Kong has gone missing following a typhoon, leaving a team of customs agents, led by Chow Ching-lai (Nicholas Tse), to discover what happened to it. They find it seemingly abandoned by an island, only to discover everyone onboard has been killed. The ship's captain, whom we see murdering one of his men for suggesting the vessel not risk the storm, attempts to escape capture, but Ching-lai gives chase, fights the fugitive in an inflatable raft, and gets lucky when the boat capsizes and knocks out the criminal, who dies in the hospital soon after.

The cargo is mainly weapons, leaving Ching-lai and his immediate superior Cheun Wan-nam (Jacky Cheung) to wonder who sent them, where they were going, and what purpose they were intended to serve. It even brings in a couple of Interpol agents from Thailand to aid with the investigation, but before anyone can piece together the mystery, a storage facility, where the illegal and deadly cargo is being held, is raided by a skilled team of mercenaries. Never let an intriguing puzzle get in the way of an elaborately over-the-top action setpiece, apparently.

Such a pattern keeps emerging in this movie, which does have some neat action sequences but seems more determined to keep them coming than to really explore the particulars of its characters' work and the grievous consequences of an international black market for any weapon or military vehicle available for trade. Most of the characters are given a single piece of melodramatic motivation to stay focused on the task at hand. Ching-lai, for example, witnesses a former romantic partner, who is about to marry another man, be killed in the robbery, although he apparently takes Wan-nam's advice about keeping emotions out of his work to heart. She's never discussed again.

Meanwhile, Interpol agent Ying (Yase Liu), who teams up with Ching-lai to track the criminals, watches as her professional partner is taken hostage by the robbers of the storage facility, making her hunt as much about finding him as it is about the finding who's behind the arms deal. The search takes the pair all the way to Africa, where a disagreement over fishing routes has resulted in a violent, bloody conflict between two fictional countries on the continent. There's something more than slightly cynical about how that war is portrayed here, especially when shots of dead, injured, and grieving civilians are quickly replaced by Ching-lai and Ying trying to escape a bombing attack. Don't let the human toll of the villains' greedy exploitation get in the way of our heroes having multiple close calls with explosions, apparently.

The evasive nature of this narrative in sidestepping such realities is questionable. The movie comes close to making some potent points about the illegal arms trade, such as with those shots before the chase in the African nation and at a legitimate weapons trade show where buyers and sellers mingle over drinks around tools of death and destruction. It always stops short of actually making them, though, either for more melodrama, including Wan-nam's struggles with bipolar disorder and his secret romance with co-worker Athena Siu (Karena Lam), or yet another display of action.

Again, some of the action in Customs Frontline works well. The robbery, in which trucks and a cargo plane are used to get the shipping container out of the facility, is cleverly staged, as is a car chase on a highway, where henchmen try to box in a potential witness against their boss at high speeds. When the extended climax with a ship and helicopters and shootouts and fistfights arrives, though, it's easy to start suspecting that the plot and characters are simply excuses for the filmmakers to stage those sequences. As shallow as everything surrounding them is, it certainly feels that way.

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