City Cop is an entertaining enough cops-and-robbers picture. But, of course, anyone interested in Hong Kong movies has probably seen this sort of thing many times before -- and that's just assuming you've seen your share of Danny Lee films. If you go with the genre as a whole, then saying City Cop is a little generic is like saying that Lindsay Lohan likes to drink just a little.

At any rate, the movie centers on a Hong Konger (perpeptual bad guy Ben Ng) who hires Mainlanders to carry out high-profile jewelry robberies. Two cops (Parkman Wong and Michael Chow) are assigned to bring the gang down, but get this -- it's really brilliant screenwriting -- they're totally mismatched and don't work well together. I have never seen anything like this.

Sarcasm aside, Parkman Wong (who is usually regulated to supporting roles) does a good job with his character. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Michael Chow, whose over-acting threatens to de-rail to picture at many points. Luckily, we get Danny Lee (who's dubbed in by someone that sounds nothing like him) popping his head in from time to time offering pearls of wisdom like "a cop's job is to catch crooks". Wow.

Okay, so this sort of stuff isn't supposed to be Shakespeare, but perhaps I expected a bit more from Herman Yau. He's one of Hong Kong's most talented directors, but you would be hard-pressed to find any of that spark here. There's a flatness to the exposition scenes that just screams out that no one involved really cared, which in turn makes the viewer disinterested.

Thankfully, the action scenes save the day. They're certainly not the best stuff Hong Kong has put out, but Chin Kar-Lok usually does a solid job in this department, and City Cop is no exception. Of particular note are a frentic shootout in a mall and the final chase, which culminates in a tense stand-off inside a movie theatre.

The action bits were so good that I wished the film-makers would have centered on them more, instead on trying to make the end result bigger than the parts that comprised it. There's nothing wrong with trying to infuse dramatics into a police film, but the final product probably would have been better if the crew has gone with a brass knuckle approach instead of a velvet glove.

RATING: 6