Enemy Shadow		Return to Review Archive - E
	Year:	1995	James Pax
	Director:	Mak Tai-Kit
	Action:	Dion Lam Dik-On
	Cast:	Jade Leung Ching, Kenneth Chan Kai-Tai, James Pax (Pak Chin-Shek), Moses Chan Ho, Ben Ng Ngai-Cheung, Shing Fui-On, Law Koon-Lan, Mak Cheung-Ching
	The Skinny:	Bizarre filmmaking choices fail to disguise the obvious: this is an empty film with no true purpose. The "arty" filmmaking is ultimately unnecessary and even distracting.
	Review by Kozo:	This bizarre action film/existential drama is like Wong Kar-Wai gone bad. Jade Leung stars as a rookie cop who witnessed her boyfriend/superior officer's death. She goes undercover but quits the force, and proceeds to wander around HK regretting her past. Her tortured soul finds a soulmate in the shady James Pax, who's regrettably a thief and a vicious killer. Even more, he may have been the guy who snuffed her late boyfriend, which is a plot detail of no real surprise.      Though the film posseses a typical genre plot, director Mak Tai-Kit leans heavily on Wong Kar-Wai's storytelling techniques to engage the audience. This means rampant voice-over and many arty sequences which only serve to confuse the audience. The filmmaking eventually rights itself for some normally shot sequences, but the damage has been done. The "artistic" atmosphere lends the film an uneasy pretension that only serves to alienate. Enemy Shadow is occasionally interesting, but ultimately empty and gratuitous. (Kozo 1995)
		image courtesy of the Hong Kong Film Critics Society
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