Popular reviews

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  Review by Filipe Furtado

  Soi Cheang is probably too talented to just serve the Milkyway Image machine (and unlike Accident, this pretty much is “Milkyway does the car chase film”), but if that's what he decided to do, it just doesn't get much better than Motorway. It’s a spare, lean action film that doesn't waste time with useless parts. It's a series of plot conventions and archetypes played by pro actors (Anthony Wong, Guo Xiadong) that can suggest a lived-in history amounting less to a generic feeling than a total empty out of human element. This is a car chase film pared to the essential: machines negotiating through space, pure stunt driving skills, and well-chosen locations over the usual speed by the way cutting.…

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  Review by Will Sloan

  A lean and resourceful cops-n-criminals thriller from Johnnie To’s company about the difficulty of both waging and filming a car chase in a city as dense as Hong Kong. Beautiful, ice-cold digital photography and nocturnal atmosphere. You can almost smell the burning rubber in the cramped parking garage.

  I’m always chasing the dragon of how Hong Kong action films felt in the pre-Handover period, but that energy is gone and was replaced by something different. This is an example of that newer energy at its best.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★ 1

  sure, this is basically HK Fast and Furious and the comparisons to Johnnie To (who produced) are apt but, for my money, this feels like Blackhat era Michael Mann doing a lean cops and robbers movie, like a digitally shot Heat by way of Tokyo Drift -- if that sounds like the coolest thing ever, it's because it kinda is

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★½ 6

  I suspect this is the Milkyway Image version of the Fast and the Furious movies, but I haven't actually seen any of those yet so I can't be sure. It is a movie with Anthony Wong playing the veteran cop a few days from retirement trying to corral his hotheaded young partner as they track down a notorious getaway driver. With lots of screeching rubber and engine revs, though with a neat twist that the car chases aren't about speed and crashes so much as stealth and maneuverability, raising the suspense level while keeping the budget down.

  Wong playing the old cop here, like Simon Yam in a similar role in Milkyway's Eye in the Sky, makes me feel ancient.

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  Review by Arsaib Gilbert ★★★★ 6

  [Favorites—2010s]

  It is almost touching to witness these days an action movie that may feature archetypal characters, situations, values but is devoid of the postmodern irony that now accompanies such films.

  The storyline of Soi Cheang’s Motorway (Che sau) will read familiar to genre aficionados everywhere—a brash, over-confident youngster is taught lessons in life and work by an elderly patrician—yet this lean, sleek police thriller manages to make us genuinely care about its characters without failing to deliver the visceral pleasures of pulp.

  It certainly helps to have the always-terrific Anthony Wong around; he is no less fascinating to observe even when he is allowed to simply be. Those of us who’ve witnessed Wong’s anarchic characters in his Category III…

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  Review by Adrian Oli ★★★★½

  Hong Kong's very own fast and furious not bigger but far better. Soi Cheang just giving me non stop thrill's. First crime drama than horror and now a racing thriller masterpiece! Give him any plot he will direct the fuck outta of a movie. It's too good to be a racing film. Starring Anothony and Shawn Yue, Soi took a simple unoriginal premise & made a racing film into a thrilling blast. It's full of inspiration and substance. Give him to direct Fast and furious saga my man will save the Franchise. Undoubtedly Soi is now my favorite working director, i also have dozen of similar fav director but Soi forcefully made me realise how much influence director made for a film. Soi saving Milkyway Image production like a boss, an ideal student of goat Johnnie To.

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  Review by More_Badass ★★★★½ 4

  Don’t be fooled by the b-movie title and poster that seem like some straight-to-DVD Fast & Furious rip-off. No, Motorway is what happens when you make an entire chase movie revolving around the kind of understated methodical precision that defined Drive. It’s the anti-Fast & Furious, in everything from its stripped-back small-scale genre thrills to its deliberate approach to chases.

  At high speeds, Motorway is a tuner car cousin to the chases of Ronin and The Driver, all clear geography and heavy vehicles and squealing tires. Its pursuits are about evasion and maneuverability, control and precision, rather than reckless vehicular spectacle. In some ways, the simple plot and simple characters - the old mentor, the young eager protagonist, the infamous outlaw, the training and mastery of a specific skill - felt reminiscent of a Western transplanted to the streets and mountain roads of Hong Kong. Just replace horses with Nissans and quickdraws with burnouts.

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  Review by Tao A ★★★★ 1

  What every Fast & Furious movie wishes it was. I absolutely love how unflashy and methodical the car chases in this are, every chase is like the equivalent of the opening scene from Drive and I take it over the boring Fast & Furious style chase any day. It doesn’t hurt that Soi Cheang is one of the few Hong Kong directors left who still has a very strong visual sense and the whole thing looks absolutely incredible, way better than this kind of movie usually does or has any right to be.

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  Review by More_Badass ★★★★½

  Motorway’s lean and precise car-chase ballet feels like a genre cinema gift nowadays. The kung fu template applied to cop-vs-wheelman cat-&-mouse: old master, young student, evil rival, a style to learn, flowing weaponry replaced by drifting chassis but still acting as extensions of hands and feet colliding in technical duels of skill. Vehicular attacks, feints, dodges, and counters at squealing-rubber pursuit speeds. Soi Cheang’s sturdy direction really lends itself to that strikingly lit Milkyway flair; the darkened garage climax with shadows sliced by head/brake lights is especially awesome.

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  Review by nrh ★★★½

  Exemplary b-movie filmmaking by Soi Cheang, who revitalizes a deeply familiar set-up by stripping the film down to its skeleton; as telegraphed as the story beats are here, the film remains somewhat distanced, even opaque. It almost refuses to be about anything, other than the inhuman movement of the cars (the chases here are as likely to be graceful and methodical as fast and frantic), the pleasure of nighttime scenes illuminated only by headlights.

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  Review by V-Felipe ★★★

  O filme traz todas as características de seu produtor, Johnnie To: cenas de ação suaves, heróis e vilões discretos e momentos elegantes de direção. Embora tenha uma história bastante direta e previsível, o filme nos entrega algumas cenas ótimas de perseguição e ação. Ele não apela para o fantasioso e o ridículo, como "Velozes e Furiosos" faz. É um filme mais pé no chão do que seus colegas, e isso pode acabar sendo desagradável para alguns e agradável para outros. Algumas das cenas me fizeram pensar no filme Drive, e parece que houve uma inspiração de fato. Esperava que houvesse reviravoltas mais emocionantes e toques interessantes para dar ao filme um diferencial a mais.

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  Review by Gondo ★★★★

  have you ever seen a film that already starts out as a skeleton but then over the course moves back instead of forward? this already is lean and clean from the beginning but then keeps reducing itself somehow even further until the last 20 minutes are just shadows drifting around corners in some of the most fascinating action film-making of the last 20 years