Leslie Cheung demonstrates his star power in Moonlight Express. Bogged down with a silly and cliched story, and sporting a soundtrack that would make even Richard Marx cringe at its' schmaltz, at many times this film feels like little more than a glorified Lifetime movie starring whatever washed-up 1980's actor that needed beer money that week. But Leslie's coolness under the pressure of hogwash that the picture sometimes spews out elevates it into something that's at least worth checking out if you're a fan of his work.

A Hong Kong and Japanese co-production, Moonlight Express also stars Tokiwa Tokako as Hitomi, a Japanese woman who travels to Hong Kong to settle her dead fiancee's affairs. She runs into Karbo (Leslie) who, in one of those coincidences you'll only see in a movie, looks exactly like her fiancee. Karbo is an undercover cop who's been set up by a corrupt colleague, and uses Hitomi's feelings to help him hide out from the police. Eventually, yes, they do fall in love, and live happily ever after together... or do they?

I'm sure most of you out there will probably not be on the edge of your seat watching this fare. Both the cop drama and romantic portions of the story follow an obvious playbook, and savvy viewers will know the outcome of the story long before the overly-long and sappy finale. It might have helped if the two elements of the plot meshed together, but they play off of each other like the proverbial snake and mongoose. You can tell well in advance when the movie is about to switch gears through the music. The cop stuff is accompanied by the usual overblown orchestral stuff, while the romantic fluff is backed by sickly-sweet and poorly sung English ballads that would feel out of place even in the cheesiest Las Vegas lounge.

Matters are saved a bit by the cinematography, which is good, if a bit derivative of Christopher Doyle's work. In fact, many elements of Moonlight Express seem to be an "homage" to the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai. But whereas Wong's films naturally inject pure and sometimes painful emotion into their characters, here everything just seems a bit too forced and hollow. In the end, Moonlight Express feels like its' director, Daniel Lee, just tried too hard and attempted to create a movie outside of his scope and comfort zone. There's nothing truly bad about Moonlight Express, but as one watches it, they very well may get deja vu from seeing this sort of thing many times before.

RATING: 6