Review for Connected: Ultimate Edition

Introduction

Turnabout's fair play! After all these years of a creatively bankrupt Hollywood plundering world cinema for story ideas, it's about time someone took a look at the few original ideas that Hollywood still has, and translated them to a foreign milieu. But the 2008 Hong Kong movie Connected goes about it the right way in my opinion. Whereas Hollywood plucks bona fide foreign hits and remakes them to less than thrilling success (the Infernal Affairs remake The Departed a notable exception), Hong Kong cinema instead took something a little mediocre and unfulfilling and gave it a hard boiled polish. It's been five and half years since I reviewed Cellular, five and half years since I last watched it. Cellular was that mobile phone advert with a plot attached to it, where kidnappers led by Jason Statham with a dodgy US accent, grabbed Kim Basinger and locked her away until she spilled the beans. All she had left for company were the battered remnants of a phone, which she managed to piece together and dial out to Chris Evans' mobile. Cue lots of action, chase sequences and stunts as the waster surfer dude raced across the city trying to save Kim's life, while the only cop who would believe him was a tired looking William H. Macy, a few days away from retirement. It was fun but dumb, forgettable and stupid, and every five minutes a phone manufacturer's logo was shoved in your face. Four years later, Warners China got the remake rights from New Line Pictures, and gave the job of directing to action movie supremo Benny Chan. And in four years, we got smartphones as well. Now the phones have apps!


All I have to do now is to cut and paste the synopsis from the first film, changing the names where appropriate…

It begins in the most innocuous of ways. Doting mother Grace Wong drives her daughter Tinker to school, and after an expression of maternal affection returns home to begin her day. She's not even halfway home when she's rammed off the road, the armed men abduct her, and take her home long enough to shoot her housekeeper. She's then taken to a remote warehouse where she is locked up, until she divulges the location of a mysterious item of which she has no knowledge. Before the door is locked, one of the abductors shatters the phone. Grace manages to piece together what's left of the phone, and by randomly tapping wires together; she manages to call for help. The number that she calls belongs to the cellular phone of Bob, a world-weary debt collector and single parent whose burdens include keeping a promise to his son to see him off at the airport. It takes a little while before he is convinced that Grace really is in dire straits, and then what follows is a desperate chase around Hong Kong as Bob tries to help Grace protect her family from the kidnappers. After an abortive attempt to talk to the police, he finds that he has to do it himself, as Grace waits fearfully on the other end of the line. A dodgy signal and a low battery are the least of his problems now.

Picture

Connected gets a 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer, and given that it is such a recent film, it's hard to find flaws during playback. The image is clear and sharp, and the colours may be a little strong for some tastes, but I believe that to be a creative choice. The action comes across well, and the only artefacts worth mentioning are some moments of slight aliasing, and of course there is one rather iffy CGI moment. I did qualify that it was fine during playback, as trying to get screencaps for it and pausing the image revealed the kind of interlacing prevalent in an NTSC-PAL standards conversion. Oddly enough the runtime indicates a native PAL transfer. The moral of the story is to watch the film, don't pause it! It's a shame that Connected isn't getting the Blu-ray treatment, as it would really shine in hi-def.

Sound

Audio comes in DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 Cantonese, although with this being such a cosmopolitan film, there is some Mandarin and English as well. Translated subtitles are provided, but everything is clear enough, the action gets a full surround workout, and the music suits the film down to a T. The only downside is the presence of a DD 5.1 English dub. I've never met a dub on a Hong Kong film that I liked, but I guess some people prefer them, hence their continued existence.

Extras

Lack of time prevented me from thoroughly exploring the extra features, copious enough to warrant a second disc. But summarising, this is what you should expect. Both discs get animated menus of course.

Disc 1 has trailers for 10 other Cine Asia releases. You'll also find the Connected Teaser and Trailer in its own trailer gallery.

Alternate, Extended, and Deleted Scenes run to a total of 43 minutes. There are 24 selections here, but no Play All option. There's a blooper reel here too.

Disc 2 kicks off with an Interview Gallery, which lets you choose from talks with director Benny Chan (21 minutes), and actors Nick Cheung (5 mins), Louis Koo (11 mins) and Barbie Hsu (9 mins).


The Making Of lasts 20 minutes, and is your usual extended advert for the film, with interview snippets with the director and cast (some repeated from above), clips from the film, and behind the scenes footage.

Speaking of Behind the Scenes, they let loose a video camera during the shoot, and grabbed a whole load of fly on the wall footage for the extras. There are 5 featurettes here.

At The Airport (37 mins)
At The Abandoned Warehouse (17 mins)
Car Stunt Part 1 (12 mins)
Car Stunt Part 2 (70 mins)
At Grace's House (23 mins)

As you can calculate, Connected gets more than four and a half hours of extra material to go with the film, certainly enough to keep you busy for a while. I only scratched the surface of it last night, and some of it seems pretty interesting, although I can imagine that over two hours of b-roll footage could get tiresome, especially if taken in one go.

Conclusion

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that Cellular was a p*** poor remake of Connected. This is one of those rare instances where a remake totally trumps the original film, although it doesn't hurt that that Cellular could use a whole lot of improving to begin with. Connected is sharper, edgier, more gripping, edge of the seat stuff. It's tense and relentless all the way through, yet alleviated by brief moments of levity at just the right points, before turning up the tension once more. In other words, it's a classic Hong Kong action thriller, with mobile phones. If you want two hours of exhilarating entertainment then put Connected at the top of your rental queue, and I would seriously consider a purchase as well.


The secret of Connected's reinvention is two-fold, localisation, and character. You can see in the interview with the director that it wasn't simply a matter of just making the Hollywood script in Hong Kong, it had to be reworked to fit in with the city, a city where cops are ubiquitous, where there isn't much of a gun culture, and where wide expanses of asphalt do not exist to allow for over the top car chases. Bob runs into policeman Fai early on, although circumstances don't immediately allow Fai to get on the case until later in the film. As a debt collector, Bob works with some unsavoury characters, which is why the car he borrows has a gun in, a gun which he has no ability to use, except in one very inventive and unconventional way. And car chases in this film are usually races against time, heavily interfered with by traffic, and again have to be constructed most inventively. The car that Bob starts off driving is a diminutive Ka, and when he's first chasing the kidnappers, we get a stunning sequence that owes more to the original Italian Job than a conventional tyres squealing, rubber burning, cardboard box shattering LA car chase.


The second thing is character. Connected is some 20 minutes longer than Cellular, and that 20 minutes is put to good use in fleshing out the characters. Grace Wong is introduced as a toy designer who works with robotics. Yes, you can believe that a housewife can piece together a shattered phone and get a dial tone. She's a widowed single mum, who loves her daughter, and has no idea why armed men are murdering her maid, and threatening her for something she has no knowledge of. In desperation she manages to call Bob. Bob is no surfer dude, hunky action hero. He's a rather wimpy debt collector, not very good at that, and not very good at keeping promises to his son, who he raises alone since his wife left him. He's very much an everyman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, somehow trying to do the right thing, but it's only through sheer luck, coincidence, or previously unrealised reserves of bravery that get him through. The policeman Fai isn't on the clichéd verge of retirement, he's instead the clichéd former detective who got busted down to traffic cop because of his stubbornness and temper, and who now has to show deference through gritted teeth to his former underlings.


As for the villain… Well, just as Jason Statham had that questionable accent, the main villain here has perhaps the most ridiculous blue rinse hairstyle on celluloid; he's a step away from becoming a smurf. But, the villains too get more of a back-story here fleshing them out, and if you're familiar with Cellular, there are more than a few twists and reversals in Connected that you will be completely unprepared for. This is a more rounded and fulfilling story.


Connected soundly kicks Cellular's arse. It is by far the better film, with a smarter story, much more interesting characters, and best of all, despite the profusion of corporate logos, it's toned down enough to never feel like an advert for a phone (one stupid ringtone notwithstanding). The filmmakers thankfully knew enough to sell the story first, and to let the gadgets take care of themselves. If they all turn out to be as good as Connected, maybe Hong Kong should remake more of Hollywood's dross.