Time and Tide

Tyler is twenty one, becomes a father through a one night stand, and takes a job with an unlicensed security firm to raise money. There he meets Jack, a former mercenary. Jack's past has not finished with him, and a South American crew arrives in Hong Kong. Tsui Hark directs. Nicholas Tse plays Tyler and Wu Bai plays Jack. The subject is not plot but movement. Tsui Hark keeps the camera in motion: shots that pass between men descending on ropes, vertical chases through the void of an apartment block, firefights staged on narrow stairs. The narrative sits between those sequences almost as a pretext. There is a context too. Tsui Hark had gone to Hollywood at the end of the nineties and made two films with Jean-Claude Van Damme, neither of which worked. Time and Tide is treated as his return to Hong Kong and to his own language. The most cited passages are the hospital and the apartment shootout, and the relationship between choreography and cutting there is held up as one of the most technical achievements in Hong Kong action. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong action and films built on camera movement. Who it is not for: the story is hard to follow and the motivations are unclear. The film does not treat that as a problem; you might.