The Hong Kong film industry is notorious for its ‘imitation’ of foreign films, but Benny Chan’s latest offering Connected is the first official adaptation of a Hollywood blockbuster. Based on David R Ellis’s 2004 action thriller Cellular, starring Kim Basinger and Chris Evans, Chan’s film transforms the original sun-and-beach Southern California setting to the busy and tense urban setting of Hong Kong.
The story starts with Grace (Barbie Hsu), a toy designer, who is kidnapped one morning after sending her young daughter to school. Locked inside an abandoned wooden house in the middle of nowhere, she finds a smashed telephone and reconnects the broken wires to dial out random numbers to ask for help. She connects with Bob (Louis Koo), an unsuccessful debt collector and single parent who cannot realize any of his promises to his son. Bob – as most of us would – considers it a crank call but through kindness and indecision just cannot hang up on Grace’s painful crying. He decides to check out her daughter’s school just in case – and sees the kidnappers taking the girl. Bob now fully believes Grace and risks his life to save her and her family.
All of that, the most interesting part of the plot, happens in the first half of the film. Chan so successfully portrays Bob as a failing yet compassionate and loveable character that audiences stay with the character through his paranoia and find his decision to believe Grace understandable. If Chan had failed in that, the whole film would have fallen apart. The most original device of the original screenplay was that the call must not be disconnected or the two main characters would lose each other forever. Not only does it maintain the tension but also gives the opportunity for relief with localised gags, such as when Bob, needing a battery charger, encounters the typical pain-in-the-neck salesman (think Rowan Atkinson in Love Actually). To this end, guest stars like Vincent Kok and Wong Cho Lam provide some lighter moments in the wound-up setting.
Later on the film, quite naturally, turns into a typical action dominated thriller. Although I saw Connected in a tiny screening room with a sound system from a failing laptop, I know the $3 million worth of car chase sequences and the final battle at the Asia Airfreight Terminal are breathtaking and, judging from Chan’s impressive CV of action flicks (Divergence, Gen-X Cops, Who Am I?), they should be. But like most of Chan’s previous films, Connected is an enjoyable picture without leaving anything to ponder over after you walk out of the cinema. The final twist is the film’s biggest flaw – now a movie cliché, it leaves the audience pulling themselves out of their seats moaning “Again?” The filmmakers cop one final plaudit, though, for not turning the movie into a huge product plug for a mobile phone brand. For a film that centres on a mobile phone, the temptation, one assumes, would have been difficult to resist.

Rachel Mok