Connianatu
How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.
AnhartLinkin
This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.
Kinley
This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
Cheryl
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
videorama-759-859391
Here's one of these films that must of gone unnoticed in it's two week running. This would have to be one of the most overlooked films of 2002. We have two great male leads for starters who play good off each other. Taiwanese cop, Leung (always impressive) becomes obsessed with this case involving bizarre instances and deaths, if stylish, some in graphic detail that all lead to some fungus which has made it's way into the brain of the victims. Morse, strong here again in these roles, plays a FBI serial killer profiler, who teams up with Leung where he almost becomes more concerned with the destruction of Leung's family, than this mind wracking case. It involved a standoff that went horribly wrong, involving a family member, from which Leung's little daughter has gone mute. It's good too that we have the family angle, and more lighter, happier moments with Leung's family and Morse, who puts him in place, regarding his lovely wife, child. This film will cause you to use your noggen, even more so towards it's bleak end. Double Vision has some very violent scenes, I warn you, one involving a priest being disemboweled, as a few quite graphic be headings in a temple. This violence quite caught me by surprise. This is a supernatural violent, and imaginative thriller of a higher order, and damn well engrossing. If you're a supernatural horror freak or not, as not ever hearing of this one, hunt it down. I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Lawson
I always like it when East meets West so I had high hopes for this movie, which is a horror with Tony Leung Ka Fai and David Morse as the two collaborating cops investigating a series of supernatural deaths. They're both good actors so it's very disappointing that the movie decides to focus more on Leung's background melodrama than the supernatural elements of the story. I mean, they plugged this movie as a horror, so I didn't really need to know about his exposing corruption on the police force, his crazy criminal cousin, or his apparent lack of a sex drive. And when the few horror scenes do come on, they sometimes wander into FX-ed out fantasy sequences that don't work. Rene Liu won best supporting actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards for this movie and I've no idea why. She's not unconvincing but it's not much of a role. Sometimes I think the Hong Kong-ers judge acting by different standards - many of their past winners have been quite inexplicable.
dromasca
I am not a fan of Asian action movies, and I was concerned when I rented this film. It actually proved to be something very different - a mix of many well known themes with exotic (for us) Taiwanese culture flavor, and all is quite well done. We have a lot in this film - the righteous cop who pays for his integrity with the cost of his family life, the cop partners who hate one another, and learn later to work together and respect each other, the clash between the American and local (in this case Taiwanese) cultures, the X-files like conflicts between science and super-natural, between believers and skeptics. It is like the Taiwanese movie industry (which I know very little about) tried to catch back with all these themes in one single film. Surprisingly it works not bad, mostly because of a director who know how to keep the balance, and to direct the actors in this maze of themes. At the end the films fails to be memorable not because it is over-charged, but because the ending plays too much tribute to the mode of the openness to bizarre and as in many other films recently it is too long and too elaborated. However, it is worth seeing, and a different experience for the mystery-action films fans. 7/10 on my personal scale.
whatdoes1know
When Edgar Allan Poe wrote Rue Morgue and other Dupin stories, he is said to have created two branches of the detective-novel: the sensational and the deductive. Trying to reconcile elements of the detective with the supernatural the way traditional Taiwan has married Westernization, DOUBLE VISION--quite the adequate title--is a hybrid worth watching for its bastardy. The detective part suffers when the movie ventures into the supernatural, and the former has holes of its own without the latter. However, once you've taken the Red Pill and bought the protagonist's story about his daughter, these holes in logic somewhat become intrinsic to elements of the supernatural, and the unexplained becomes the unexplainable that is plainly accepted. This fallacy grows on the film like the hallucinatory mold the plot revolves around, and DOUBLE VISION gains dreamy and poetic dimensions. Undoubtedly, this is not the deductive type of mystery--the cancer of sensationalism is as terminal as a brain tumor better left not operated: it is the entire charm of the movie.