Wow, was this awful.
I have the horrible horrible feeling that the Funktastics were someone’s serious idea of what a street gang might really be like.
It would be possible to argue that the movie was really meant to be campy and intentionally silly. I’d really like to think that was the case, but I’m still not convinced that the funny bits were the parts they meant to be funny…
Anyhow, regardless of whether the sillyness was entirely intentional or not, the cinematography was the worst I’ve seen in a long time. If there was any way to accept a take, they obviously did it, and I don’t think they felt any great need to do any editing or post-production afterwards. In one talking heads scene, the depth of field was so bad that everyone was out of focus, and while I’m not exactly a master of mise-en-scene, I think I could do a better job on most shots with my eyes closed using a super-8 camera. Evidently they shot their wad for special effects really early in the movie, like in the opening credits using a faked up CGI macro lens on a fake looking butterfly, as the effects near the end were almost ludicrously bad, and the closing credits appear to have been done manually on some old analog video special effects box.
Anyway, compare this to a real Chow Yun Fat movie like say Hardboiled, and well… really there is no comparison. The opening credits of Hardboiled were worth 100 of this stupid movie.