Let's Go! (where exactly?)

Wong Ching Po's action offering, Let's Go! is a weird creature. If you watch the trailers (I didn't) then it would seem like this movie is a pastiche of old school Japanese anime, presumably the ones that were shown in Hong Kong in the eighties. If you went ahead and watched the film, you'd see that that isn't the case at all; it feels more like a gangster movie than anything else, with only a few references to the aforementioned anime. And then in the last 20 or so minutes, the film transforms into something like a superhero origin story that comes completely out of the blue that it seems ridiculous in hindsight.

The main character of the story, Siu Sheng, is this guy who has a talent for fighting. He was a fan of the old Japanese anime Space Emperor God Sigma, which actually aired in Hong Kong in the eighties. However, a personal tragedy made him rethink his life. One day he is recruited to the Matsumoto group, a now legit organization with shady origins. He is made into the personal bodyguard of the boss' daughter Annie. All is well until Shing, the guy who recruited him, decides to perform a hostile takeover of the company.

The movie builds up for an hour and wanders around with Siu Sheng not really doing much, riding around with his girlfriend boss' daughter and getting drunk. When shit hits the fan, we see characters that suddenly come out of nowhere and act as if they were part of the story from the start. There's this mysterious guy who helps Siu Sheng in his time of need, who is actually the son of the cop that failed to save Siu Sheng's father, whose backstory and motivations are only revealed 10 minutes after we see him, and the old guys living in the shopping street where Siu Sheng lives, who conveniently know martial arts well enough to take on gun toting gangsters.

Let's Go ends up being a movie that doesn't know what the hell it is. It builds up characters at the wrong times, while severely underdeveloping others. When the climax comes along, you wonder how it got to this point. It could have focused more on the neighborhood watch group and let that build up, but it didn't. It could have been made into this gangster movie with throwbacks to that anime, but it did not. It ended up being a mishmash of ideas that don't glue together, like ketchup and chocolate.