Review | Customs Frontline movie review: Nicholas Tse is a one-man army in this ludicrous actioner

Hong Kong customs officers seize an arms cache and all hell breaks loose in Herman Yau’s film. Tse’s fine job as action director is wasted

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Nicholas Tse as a Hong Kong customs officer in a still from Customs Frontline (category IIB; Cantonese), directed by Herman Yau. Jacky Cheung and Karena Lam co-star.

Published: 6:15pm, 3 Jul 2024

2/5 stars

The employees of the Hong Kong government’s Customs and Excise Department receive the cinematic homage they have probably never realised they deserved in Customs Frontline, a ludicrously conceived and literally all-guns-blazing action thriller that at times plays like a war movie.

Herman Yau Lai-to may have gradually supplanted Dante Lam Chiu-yin and the late Benny Chan Muk-sing as Hong Kong action cinema’s most productive filmmaker in the years since he tried his hand at big-budget crime thrillers with 2017’s Shock Wave, but it is also fair to say that his recent efforts have not been great.

Watching Customs Frontline, suspension of disbelief is essential as we follow Nicholas Tse Ting-fung’s heroic and utterly fearless customs officer while he wages a one-man war against an international firearms trafficking syndicate that is foolish enough to pick Hong Kong as a transit point.

While one would be hard pressed to find any record of Hong Kong customs officers opening fire, Yau and his screenwriters Erica Li Man and Eric Lee Sing are not ones to let the facts get in the way of a good story – one that sees the city suffer major collateral damage from some made-up warfare in Africa.

And so, after a vessel carrying a large cache of weaponry is found in Hong Kong waters, mid-level customs officer Lai (Tse) leaps into action. Things get much worse when an army of mercenaries appears out of nowhere and, with deadly force, shoots its way into a government warehouse to retrieve the seized cargo.