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Asian cinema: Hong Kong film
LifestyleEntertainment

How Gen-X Cops led Hong Kong’s new-style ’90s action films that featured young actors, more special effects … and sub-par scripts

  • Hong Kong cinema was flagging in the late 1990s, and filmmakers looked to Hollywood for inspiration, changing how they made action films
  • Gen-X Cops was a classic example of the new style, with younger stars, computer-driven special effects and a faster pace

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(From left) Stephen Fung, Sam Lee and Nicholas Tse in a still from “Gen-X Cops”, one of the first of a crop of fast-paced late 1990s Hong Kong action films that featured young actors and computer-generated effects.
Richard James Havis

The 1990s were a golden age for Hong Kong cinema, but the quality of commercial films dropped after 1997. This had nothing to do with the return to China, and was a result of problems within the film industry.

Put simply, it was in trouble, and Hong Kong filmmakers and producers were scrabbling to find formulas to save it.

The result was a reinvention of Hong Kong action films that was heavy on computer-generated effects, featured a new crop of young stars, and unspooled at a dizzying pace, even for Hong Kong cinema.

To make them seem international, films featured more Western actors – professional imports such as Paul Rudd rather than local amateurs – as well as foreign-born Chinese performers such as Daniel Wu Yin-cho.

The stories usually presented Hong Kong as a hi-tech paradise in which energetic young heroes battled computer-savvy villains with up-to-the-minute weaponry.

The late Benny Chan Muk-sing’s surprise 1999 hit Gen-X Cops, and its sequel Gen-Y Cops, led the pack. Other films included Downtown Torpedoes, sometimes referred to as Hong Kong’s Mission Impossible, and Gordon Chan Kar-seung’s 2000AD.
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