Marco Mak takes a page out of Wong Jing's playbook with The Replacement Suspect, a remake/ripoff (depending on your view) of the American film Albino Alligator. As you might expect, as with many of Wong and other Hong Kong film-makers' "homages", the end results here aren't all that great.

The basic story (which, even though it was "inspired" by an existing movie, apparently took four people to come up with) has a trio of jewel thieves (Julian Cheung, Simon Lui, and Roy Cheung) on the run from the cops (led by Mr. Mook Jung himself, Michael Fitzgerald Wong) who end up holing up in a bar that's also harboring an arms dealer played by Kenny Bee, who looks the whole time as if he really regretted signing up for this production.

Even if the story wasn't directly taken from Albino Alligator, it's something that's not really all that original, having been used in many films before, such as Rio Bravo and its' martial arts counterpart, Dragon Inn. But there's still a feeling that this could have been an interesting picture if anyone involved with it had actually cared about the proceedings.

Michael Wong, in particular, seems to only have been working on this film to get a handful of cigars. Thankfully, though, if one wants to look for the silver lining, every puff Mikey takes shaves off a few more minutes that he doesn't get to torture the audience via his simultaneous mangling of Cantonese and English.

It might be a case of being a bargain-basement low-budget picture, but there's just such a sloppy and unpolished feeling to The Replacement Suspect that it really cannot maintain the viewer's interest for very long, except perhaps to scrutinize the movie's shortcomings, which include many scenes that were obviously done in one take due to the fact that the actors flubbed their lines or the camera was in a poor filming position.

From beginning to end, The Replacement Suspect is an extremely average Hong Kong crime drama that will really only appeal in a small way to die-hard fans who have already partaken in the more well-known entries in the genre and are hard-up in finding something new and better to watch.

RATING: 5