MovieChat Forums > Dai si gin (2004) Discussion > Hostages with Explosives

Hostages with Explosives


The grenades on the hostages were no threat as the pins & safety levers were all intact. It would have been more believable as wireless command-detonated explosives.

The grenades on the stove-top were also silly because an open flame as an igniter is a rather unpredictable way to initiate the fuzes. The explosion was also far less than what would be expected.

It was obvious that all the grenades were training dummies as they still had the blue-painted safety levers evident.

The film loses a lot of plausibility with these kinds of lapses.

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There's a bigger question... ¿¿Where did so many hostages come from?? I thought there was only the father and the two kids in the "bad ones" hands, and suddenly there's about a dozen of hostages.

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That's what is just one of the goofy things about this movie -- First there was the general evacuation of the apartment building. Then the bad guys sent out the hostages wired with explosives as a decoy while they adopted the ruse to cover the escape. The way the film was edited certainly left most viewers with the impression that there were more than two groups of people bundled up under blankets/drapes/tableclothes or whatever.

Its stuff like this that negates whatever dramatic tension and good story-telling that HK films aspire too. If you have watched enough Hong Kong cop and crime movies you will regularly see that unprofessional police conduct, procedures and tactics abound. Maybe it actually is like that over there -- that the law enforcement standards that we are accustomed to seeing and also expect from the police in the United States is just about non-existent. Examples: Frequent contamination of crime scenes, police brutality, unlawful search and interrogation, lack of body armor, wholesale violation of what are near non-existent policies and procedures (omitted for dramatic license or for real?).

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"Examples: Frequent contamination of crime scenes, police brutality, unlawful search and interrogation, lack of body armor, wholesale violation of what are near non-existent policies and procedures (omitted for dramatic license or for real?)."

I see that very often in American films as well, less often now than in the 80s though.

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The hostages came from their homes. I just saw the movie so its fresh in my mind. When the main police force comes to the building they start evacuating from the ground up. On the 7th floor during evacuation they get in a gun fight with Chun who then runs up to the 8th floor and ends up in the apartment with Yuen and his partner. The police then stop the evacuation of the tenants at the 7th floor and tell the tenants on the 8th floor to stay in their apartments. Therefore they has so many hostages.

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