On the plus side, the action sequences are directed by Tsui Hark’s frequent collaborator Ching Siu-Tung, who made the fabulous A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and sequels and has directed action sequences on just about every fantastic Hong Kong film ever made. ![]() None of this is helped by the characters who are idiotic one-dimensional caricatures, the cartoonish sound effects and the terribly flat English-language dubbing. ![]() The height of inanity is the scenes where John Sham reprograms the Maria robot with the codeword “I love Loony” and he and Tsui Hark keep superseding each other’s commands and getting the robot to turn and attack the other, and various scenes with them being electrocuted, dragged behind a car and eventually dumped into a portable toilet. It is all inane slapstick down around the level of custard pie fights – John Sham getting on a scooter and pedalling with his feet scenes with police accidentally getting the handcuffs on the wrong people Tsui Hark thinking the robot version of Sally Yeh is her trying to reconcile with him as she demolishes most his apartment in an attempt to kill him. There is a promisingly adept opening with the giant robot bursting out of a bank and past a cordon of armed police amid much mass destruction, which is contrasted with the comic relief of Tony Chiu-Wei Leung’s reporter who keeps dropping his camera every time he gets a perfect shot.Īlas, this slapstick element almost entirely comes to dominate the film. Director David Chung taps squarely into the giddily silly and often shrilly hysteric slapstick vein that runs through much of Hong Kong light entertainment. While it met with modest success, Roboforce is a rather silly film. At the time, Roboforce/I Love Maria achieved a minor curiosity value for featuring a rare acting role from cult Hong Kong director/producer Tsui Hark, the man who fairly much invented Hong Kong’s Wu Xia style of filmmaking with Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and directed other hits like Once Upon a Time in China (1991), Green Snake (1993), as well as produced the A Chinese Ghost Story and Swordsman series and several of John Woo’s early films. ![]() Roboforce/I Love Maria is a Hong Kong variant on RoboCop (1987) – it even came out less than a year after RoboCop had.
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