Raymond Lee had a fairly short career as a director, spanning about eight years. During that time, he found success with swordplay movies like Dragon Inn, but often floundered when he worked in other genres, as evidenced by his often rudderless and meandering 1990 Triad potboiler entry, The Killer's Blues.

The well-worn tale stars Ti Lung as Ming, a Triad hitman who adopts Suet, the orphaned daughter of one of his targets. Shortly after, he is sent to prison, so it's up to Ming's long-suffering girlfriend, Wai (Olivia Cheng) to raise Suet. When Ming is released from the clink fourteen years later, he finds his gang in disarray due to a power struggle, and must decide whether to protect his brothers in crime or try and go straight with his family.

Most viewers who have seen these types of movies before should know what to expect here: crisises of conscience, actors chewing the scenery, lots of oversized knives, a few double-crosses, melodramatics and hysterical crying, and a couple of shootouts thrown in for good measure. It's all made well enough, but there's never a feeling that Raymond Lee is extending himself as a director, much less attempting to raise the bar for the genre.

Compared to some of the dreck released under the Triad umbrella, The Killer's Blues at least provides some entertainment, mostly via Ti Lung's performance, which really is quite good, especially keeping in mind the shallow nature of the script. Under-rated action director Tony Leung Siu-Hung also creates some fine pyrotechnics near the finale. But, unless you're a manic movie watcher and have already seen more than their fair share of Triad films, there's nothing really that compelling here to make this a movie worth making more than a minimal effort to track down and watch.

RATING: 5