Hong Kong action cinema, once the home of the most kinetic and

Hong Kong action cinema, once the home of the most kinetic and crazy (and often wildly absurd) adrenaline filmmaking on the planet, has never really found any success in its 21st century shift to gritty naturalism and bleak themes. The strain has apparently found some success in Asia, if the continuing career of Dante Lam is any indication, but to my Western eyes the style is a bad fit with the melodramatic story structure and weirdly maudlin emotion conventions of commercial Hong Kong filmmaking. The Beast Stalker (titled less to describe the characters than name check Lam’s earlier Beast Cops) is a long, slow, grimly humorless crime drama of a hot-shot young police captain (Nicholas Tse) who drops out of the force after one of his cases ends in tragedy and then goes rogue to save the kidnapped daughter of a prosecuting attorney (Jingchu Zhang), snatched off the street by a half-blind kidnapper/killer for hire (Nick Cheung). The plot goes through so many contortions to set up a web of coincidence, responsibility, blame and guilt that drives the characters that there’s no suspension of disbelief left to forgive the logical leaps and miraculous escapes by the kidnapper, who at one point powerwalks the street with a bound and gagged little girl under his arm. If such a sight no longer raises alarm bells in the Hong Kong slums anymore, then I am officially terrified for the city. More likely the director just tried to slide it past the bullshit censors of the audience, but there’s nothing to distract the audience from these glaring gaps in rational thought–the characters are blank under their glib psychological profiles and the procedural sequences drag the film down between the bursts of grim, grimy action. The Beast Stalker Neptune 4 p.m. Fri., May 22. Harvard Exit 7 p.m. Wed., May 27. Uptown, 11 a.m., Sat., May 30.