Cast Member: Philip Ng

‘Big Blue Lake’ is a quietly confident debut, not especially enthralling or dramatic, but with enough positives to recommend it.

It’s best viewed as an occasionally enjoyable diversion that, on sporadic occasions, hints at how good a reboot of one of the 80s most iconic film series could be.

It doesn’t rank up there with the best of any genre but for a lightweight action-comedy it is worth a watch.

The master stroke is of course the incorporation of Yuen Woo Ping as fight choreographer and he serves up some of the best fisticuffs of recent years.

Hong Kong has always spliced genres together with aplomb, but this is an example of where things go wrong.

It has a fairly optimistic aim of being a comedy ‘Detective Dee’ and while it might not quite achieve a happy union between its components this is an undemanding distraction.

‘Undercover Hidden Dragon’ is better than the past few Ronald Cheng films, but not as consistently entertaining as ‘Super Model’, perhaps the benchmark for his comedy.