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Connected – action director Benny Chan’s official remake of Hollywood blockbuster Cellular – is not the first Hong Kong rip-off of a Hollywood film, but it is the first to actually admit it. An exhilarating joyride of a movie, it trumps its original in most conceivable aspects, from the more explosive car chases to the subtler fine-tuning of its tone and character settings. Some would suggest that the product placement is better executed here, too – and who’s to argue with that?

Following an unlikely hero (Bob, played by Louis Koo) who races through Hong Kong’s cityscape to stay on the line with a kidnapped woman calling on a broken phone (Grace, played by Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu), the story’s premise stretches the limits of credibility, but works wonders as an excuse for a frenzied action movie, if not also a mobile phone advertisement. Sometimes you just have to give it to the advertisers: four years on since Cellular, they’ve now seamlessly integrated such technologies as phone map, video calling, and MMS into the tight storyline.

The plot, as if it really matters, comes down to this: how many multiple car crashes could you willingly cause only minutes into a phone call from a total stranger pleading for help? The answer: ‘many’ – this film is to be enjoyed for its hyper-kinetic set-pieces more than anything else. As a result, every action sequence in Connected has been turned up a notch from the original: when the kidnappers capture Grace, they don’t just break into her house, but decide to crash straight into her car at full speed; when Bob’s car accidentally runs into the wrong lane, it’s not just about a few swerving cars, but a truly spectacular multiple car crash, and the collapse of a huge scaffolding, only coming to a halt after colliding with a truckload of Pepsi’s newest product. Talk about timing.

Leaving aside Chan’s usual brilliant handling of action, the director has also surprisingly shown a deft hand in cutting out the B-movie-ish crap from Cellular, which arguably kept the original from becoming a truly respectable film. Doing away with Jessica Biel’s annoying ex-girlfriend character, the green facemask on a disgruntled William H. Macy, and the “Ricky Martin” jokes of the original, Connected even finds time to pull a few heartstrings by making its protagonist a debt-collecting single father striving not to upset his young son – a fantastic touch when one compares him with the original’s pathetic protagonist, who races against time just to please his ex-girlfriend (who, by the way, despises him).

While it’s clear that Chan does try hard to smooth out the implausibility of the material (like changing the profession of Grace ‘the miracle phone rescuer’ from a high-school teacher to an electronics engineer), there are inevitably some missteps in his grand scheme of ramping everything up: among others, the setting of a pivotal scene at a popular site for model plane enthusiasts strikes me as an unintentional insult on the kidnappers’ intelligence.

But then again, I only managed to recognise these flaws upon retrospective reflection – something that this film is clearly not designed for. Back in the cinema, I was pretty convinced that this is one of the most enjoyable films to come out of Hong Kong this year. Edmund Lee

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