DRAGON SQUAD is the product of writer-director Daniel Lee who was inspired by a hit Japanese TV series from the ’70s to create a story about a squad of supercops taking on an equally skilled gang of criminal mercenaries in the mean streets of Hong Kong. The intent appears to have been to create a successful hybrid between Japan’s Kinji Fukasaku-inspired super-heroic crime action with the gritty, stylized presentation of Michael Mann. Add John Woo-style gunplay, a dose of martial arts mastery from Sammo Hung and stir it all together with action choreography from veteran Chin Kar-lok. Sounds like a winner. Too bad it ain’t.

Daniel Lee’s first mistake was taking on the task of updating Japanese action series G-MEN ’75, starring heavyweight genre legends Yasuaki Kurata and Tetsuro Tamba, by replacing them with an ensemble cast of six lightweight youngsters. They cannot even collectively carry a movie themselves without support from Michael Biehn, Sammo Hung, Simon Yam, Heo Joon-ho (SILMIDO), and Maggie Q. A good indicator that something is wrong with the lineup is when Maggie Q, who only has a small supporting role and no lines, is given top billing for the U.S. release. Even her co-starring roles in MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3 and LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD do not justify that marketing smokescreen. Blame should be laid squarely on Lee’s shoulders for first botching the script, then the casting and finally his own direction, all these are mistakes I’ve come to expect from him following middling actioners like WHAT PRICE SURVIVAL and STAR RUNNER.

The plot is pretty simply but its presentation is not. A Triad boss is abducted on the way to trial by a crack, international team of lawless mercenaries and an elite Interpol team is assembled to track him down. The crime boss ultimately has little to do with the story which becomes engulfed in an urban war between both sides.

The Interpol agents are filled out by Taiwanese pop singer Vanness Wu, actor Shawn Yue, pop singer Lawrence Chou, and mainlanders Xia Yu and Eva Huang. I’m not sure if the filmmakers could have put together a more insubstantial leading cast for an action movie that tries really hard to be taken seriously.

The action is surprisingly violent, even by Hong Kong standards. Police have their throats sliced open and are pointlessly ambushed and gunned down like cattle. A torture victim is hung from hooks embedded into his shoulders. Another guy is dragged down a hallway by a rope and when his buddies catch up to him, all they find is his severed leg dangling from the ceiling. Others suffer from knife wounds, flying metal shrapnel, fire, and even an umbrella that is quickly converted to fire its wire frame into victims like lethal crossbow darts.

All of this gruesome action is shot with rough handheld work and sporadic zooms, both intentionally designed to mimic the Paul Greengrass method famously applied to the second and third BOURNE films. What Lee apparently failed to understand is that this documentary style of shooting only works when the story is believable and the action realistic. DRAGON SQUAD tries to play it both ways by mixing into this fracas the idea of super marksmen. Each of the Interpol agents and their chief adversaries are introduced as expert weapons handlers with a specialty such as firing on the move or sniping.

Lee is clearly obsessed with trying to reinvent the wuxia genre for modern times. It started with his attempt to directly drag wuxia storytelling, complete with the swordplay and clan warfare, into a modern setting in his directing debut, WHAT PRICE SURVIVAL (1994). DRAGON SQUAD is basically the same situation except that guns have replaced swords. Characters duel in extended gunplay battles. The best example of this is when during a pitched battle, Maggie Q and Xia Yu turn their sniper rifles against each other and blast away while dodging all over the place. All the main characters unload round after round without hitting any of their key adversaries until Lee is ready to give us an overly dramatic death scene.

If this “gun-kata” in a real-world setting were not ludicrous enough, Lee keeps shifting our focus back to POWER RANGERS-style glamour shots of our heroes and villains posing in semi-flashbacks. It’s unintentional self-parody to see characters’ hair whipped up by fans in slow motion. The crazy thing is he keeps doing it over and over again, as if somehow we’ll start to believe these characters are as cool as Lee thinks they are. Lee shows us how truly out of sync he is with the situation by adding sappy music layered on top of horribly-acted melodrama moments, the same immature drivel we were subjected to in STAR RUNNER. With so many characters to focus on and no real stars leading, the viewers’ focus is jerked all over the place and then we’re expected to care when it’s presented in an overly stylized and occasionally cartoony fashion.

What I find especially odd is that Michael Biehn, who plays the lead villain and is one of only two Caucasian characters, is given more depth and attention than anyone else. Surprisingly, a sub-plot involving Biehn’s relationship with the wife of a Triad boss, played by Li Bing-bing, is actually pretty decent. Lee could have easily cut out half the cast and focused more intently on Biehn and it could have worked better.

As much as I like Sammo and enjoy watching him fight, his character serves no purpose in this movie because it is far too underdeveloped. He’s supposed to be a mentor to the Interpol team but it’s heavily contrived. The chemistry between him and the team is non-existent. Really, the only reason Sammo is here is so he can fight and he’s doubled for a good portion of his big duel with Korean actor Heo Joon-ho so what’s the point? Thankfully, one of the worst fight sequences of his entire career was cut out of the final print (it can be found as an extra on the Dragon Dynasty DVD).

Heo, by the way has incredible presence and is criminally underused. Likewise, Simon Yam completely goes to waste. Producer Bey Logan has mentioned that there was a lack of chemistry between Lee and Yam. Based on the misuse of the best cast members and the poor performances of the younger leads I’d say Lee wasn’t connecting with anyone very well, save for his action director and cinematographer.

I don’t like getting personal but I have to say it, Lee is horribly overrated as a film director and I don’t understand why he keeps getting high-profile work. I’m inclined to place him somewhere between the gross absurdity of Uwe Boll and the soulless mediocrity of Brett Ratner. Lee specifically fudges so many aspects of DRAGON SQUAD, while working with so much potential that I can’t help but think that something is wrong with his head. If he were a genuine B-moviemaker or were making a truly bad film, then I’d judge him differently. But he’s trying to pass himself off as A-list material in Hong Kong and I don’t see the talent to justify that status. In contrast, Johnnie To is an A-list filmmaker who can actually mix style with substance to create success. Others like Wilson Yip manage success by steering clear of pretentious directing that exceeds their abilities. So far, all I’m seeing from Daniel Lee is something akin to an overzealous art student making a fugly collage, pasted together from master works, and displayed in an expensive frame.

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