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Review: The Bullet Vanishes

Lo Chi-leung's mystery actioner
By BRETT MICHEL  |  August 28, 2012
2.5 2.5 Stars

Piracy has never been more rampant in China. Take, for example, this latest film from director Lo Chi-leung (Double Tap). There's an explosive sequence near the end that's a complete lift of the slow-motion booby-trap grenade sequence in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. Sure, this mystery actioner wouldn't exist if not for Robert Downey Jr.'s spin on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, but as far as cheap knock-offs go, Ching-Wan Lau (of Johnnie To's Life Without Principle) as newly minted National Police Officer Song is a fairly flattering imitation. Song joins new partner Guo (Nicholas Tse of Dante Lam's The Viral Factor), "the fastest gun in Tiancheng," to solve a series of murders taking place around a munitions factory nearly a century ago. "There's no such thing as a perfect crime, just good people gone bad," says Song, which probably doesn't include Lo, whose plagiarism is hardly a crime in Hollywood.

  Topics: Reviews , Sherlock Holmes, mystery, action
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