Chek dou

I went to see Helios with no preconceived idea of the critics response and fearing the worse but I was pleasantly surprised and had a good thrill thanks to a few decent action scenes and I felt entertained throughout, which I cannot say about Cold War, one of the film makers previous effort. The cast was good and I loved the way each country was presenting itself in a very good light but different from one another. Modern movie clichés if you like...Anyway,it had the style one associates with the directors but again, unlike Cold War, it actually looked like HK and made it an OTT version of the city which suited the movie ambitious concept(some may say pretentious). At times walking the fine line between slick and cheesy, it got me involved and I will go and see the sequel.

A good actioner with enough pizzaz to satisfy fans of Asian commercial movies.

Well made with good production values and a stellar cast from all over SE Asia. One or two action scenes worth watching but the rest of the movie is almost like a Tourist guide to HK and Macau. The plotline is shambolic - at one point some very valid political points are made about HK (movie was made in 2015) almost predicting the future. Ending is even worse. All eye candy - don't waste your time unless you are looking for a travelogue about HK.

The first 30 minutes look good, but the farther back, the worse. Simple action movies have to involve politics, and then black is not firm enough, so we have to turn around. Too many plots are deliberately mystified. There are many logical bugs. It's not good to end up with a bad ending.

I gave 2 stars just for the firefighting scenes, if without considering this very small and unimportant part, then it should get only 1 star or even less. Again, a lousy screenplay with terrible and awkward dialog, the conversation between every two persons or three persons were so awkward and illogical, especially when the guy who played the high ranking official from China tried to deliver his bullshitting national security crap, the guy just turned into an obnoxious moron, the logic of his reasoning about holding the nuclear weaponry in Hong Kong, then got excuse to discuss and negotiate this situation was just absurd and ridiculous, even a low I.Q. moron would think it was stupid.

At the very beginning of the movie, we saw a crashed airplane, then we saw a young woman from China visited the crashing site. It was a night scene, yet this female moron still unbelievably wore dark sunglasses! As soon as this scene appeared on the screen, my immediate thought was: "WTF?!" And from then on, ridiculous scene after scene accompanied with the stupidest and the most awkward dialog kept coming up.

The actor who played the so-called "Helios" was definitely a terrible wrong cast, a skinny guy looked like a junkie without showing any believable cunning abilities to be a well-known international weaponry smuggler. Then there was his bodyguard, another "WTF?!" casting again. Casting pretty and sexy flesh and meat to play a dangerous, murderous role, even it may be necessary, this young woman was absolutely inserted just for the eye-candy to boost the box office, but it's still a very formulaic and stupid appendix role.

The guy who played the highest Hong Kong police officer was another wrong choice for such important role, the guy with a botox cosmetic face and a sissy hairdo only gave the viewers another unconvincing, much too light weighted lamer impression.

The professor was unfortunately given terrible dialog to almost every occasion, and his formulaic image of a bookworm nerd was a funny bow tie!

Two handsome Korean male actors were good; at least the plastic cosmetic jobs were great. :)

Yes the movie and its "story" is all over the place - but the action this delivers (sporadically but sufficient) makes up for that. You may also feel that the ending is a letdown, but hopefully this all will not take away the fun you can have with this. And I use fun lightly here, since this is a serious matter we are talking about (terrorism and all that).

It could have been shorter and I'm not sure if there will be a sequel in the future. Maybe that would change the view for some, maybe if there wouldn't be one it would change their view on this also. For now we can only judge what we have in front of us and it's a decent effort in the thriller/terror genre