Directors Joe Ma and Soi Cheang team up with 2004's comedy/sci-fi picture Hidden Heroes, which should answer that age-old question of "What would The Terminator be like if we had the robot be played by a teenybopper pop star and mashed it up with a romantic comedy?" Well, okay, I'm sure no one's really asked that question outside of a pitch meeting held in the sixth level of Hell, but that's what we've got here. Surprisingly, the results aren't as bad as you might think.

The aforementioned pop star is Charlene Choi, who, as an offshoot of her popularity from being in the musical duo Twins, was a hot commodity in movies of the time, with this being one of ten films she was in during 2004 alone. Choi's work as an actor has been up and down -- sometimes it's a matter of bad material, other times she seems to not care much -- but she can always be depended on to be look cute and be hatable as a bag of gummi bears. Even if the movie she's in is bad, Choi manages to bring up things a couple of notches when she's onscreen.

Keeping that in mind, it's a good thing that the producers tapped Choi, because the scenes without her (and a good number that do) are sometimes painful to watch. Getting past the silliness of the story (Choi plays a robot sent to the past to kill bumbling cop Ronald Cheng) as well as the big plot holes and lazy methods of convenience the time travel gimmick offers, one still encounters a major stumbling block to their enjoyment of the film in Mr. Cheng. Long promoted as a successor to the "nonsense comedy" throne of Stephen Chow, Cheng's antics can work if he's under the right director, but it unfortunately appears that neither Joe Ma or Soi Cheang was capable of generating a good performance from him.

Along with Cheng's fairly awful thespianic work at display here, the movie also could have technically been done better in other ways. Running at almost two hours, it feels like there should have been a few elements cut out, or at least trimmed. In particular, the character of Cheng's girlfriend (Asuka Higuchi) really offers nothing to add to the story, other than a repository for unfunny anti-Japanese humor. Despite its' flaws, though, Hidden Heroes ends up actually being enjoyable to watch, mostly because of Charlene Choi. She ends up creating a very likable character, and it wanting to see what happens to her, not the next joke to roll out of Ronald Cheng's maw, that will keep you entertained.

RATING: 6