Movie Reviews
Review | Road to Vendetta: Jeffrey Ngai plays an assassin in his first lead role
2.5/5 stars
As one of the most handsome faces to emerge from Hong Kong’s latest generation of film actors, Jeffrey Ngai Tsun-sang’s ascent to a leading role was inevitable. After playing several supporting parts, including two rather silly ones (in the comedies Everything Under Control and Table for Six 2), he is finally getting the chance.
Road to Vendetta, a violent, John Wick-inspired action thriller co-produced by Hong Kong and Japan, delivers as a pop idol vehicle with its ample visual style. For all the effort to make an anti-hero out of Ngai, however, the film’s screenplay appears multiple revisions away from telling a convincing story.
Any suspicion that logic would prevail over the cool factor is dispelled in the opening scene, when No 4, the poker-faced Hong Kong assassin played by Ngai, engages his unarmed target in a brutal brawl on a moving tram before finally strangling him. He could have simply started with the strangulation.
The “vendetta” in the film’s English title refers partly to No 4’s traumatic childhood, during which he survived a mystery attack that resulted in his mother’s beheading, before being taken in by a secret organisation of assassins. The connection between these events is as straightforward as one might guess.