Maybe it's the summer heat percolating my brain or the sixer of Mountain Crest lubricating my liver, but for one of the seemingly most reviled movies of the past decade, The Wesley's Mysterious File actually isn't that bad. Granted, it's still not A-list material, or even B-list, but compared to some more recent releases, at least it provides some decent (if totally brainless) entertainment.

The character of Wesley (aka Wisely) is a popular one in China, having appeared in dozens of novels and several films, including Seventh Curse and Bury Me High. He's a dashing adventurer in the vein of Indiana Jones, and this time out, he's working in San Francisco for the AAA. No, not the auto club, but the Alien Abduction Agency, a Men in Black-style clandestine government group that is charged with keeping tabs on various aliens "visiting" Earth.

Wesley's main rivals are in "Double-X", a secret branch of the FBI that apparently stocks its' staff with Chinese people, most notably brother and sister Kei and Sue (Roy Cheung and Hsu Chi). Both agencies, along with the Warlock Toxin Gang (Mark Cheng and Almen Wong), are after the mysterious "blue blood" alien Fong (Rosamund Kwan), whose psychic abilities could change the world's balance of power.

There is certainly a lot to find wrong here. Most pointedly, why was most of this movie set in San Francisco? All this leads to is the Chinese actors mangling their English lines and the western actors also mangling their English lines. Possibly from the infusion of money from western studios like Columbia, there was a trend in Hong Kong film-making during this period to try and make the movies more palatable to western audiences, and the intent almost never worked in practice, as we can clearly see here.

Also, for a movie that pins a lot of its' appeal on the special effects, a lot of them are not very good. There is one scene where Wesley and Fong have some sort of weird alien mind-meld sex that basically looks like someone fell asleep on the "lens flare" button of Photoshop. The CGI aliens, which should be imposing and scary, instead look like something off an old Playstation game; perhaps not coincidentally, some of the alien designs are ripped outright from games like Resident Evil and The House of the Dead.

Still, despite its' problems, if you're not that picky of a viewer and/or a huge Andy Lau fan, you might still dig up something worthwhile here. It does straddle that line between being a good "bad" movie and just being a plain bad movie. This is the sort of film you pop on after coming home from a bar and just are in the mood for light fare, not if you're into contemplating the deeper mysteries of the human psyche.

RATING: 5