Waiting for a Badass to Rise: Pacified Renegade Cops in 'Invisible Target' and 'Typhoon'

To be a real badass, any self-respecting renegade cop must confront the baddy he's been doggedly chasing all film long in a fight that will climax when the baddy says something like this: "Under different circumstances, we too could have been friends." It's a perplexing but all-too true fact. The pair understand each other all too well and that makes kicking each other's asses that much harder.

The desired effect of such a statement-which must always be stated by the baddy-is either to make our antihero think "Gee, maybe this guy isn't as bad as he seems," or "Am I that close to the edge that I've been threatening to go over for so long?!" Both rhetorical questions are answered when the hero beats the snot out of the baddy and he either looks back with a remorseful gaze at his tragically misunderstood nemesis or doesn't look back at all-a sign that his victory ensures him the moral higher ground.

Both Benny Chan's [Invisible Target] and Kyung-taek Kwak's [Typhoon](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475750/) (both recently released on DVD) milk that essential formula to the renegade actioner for its all its worth but eventually commit a major no-no by making the renegade a team player. What makes the renegade so close to the baddy and such a lovely macho is that he's a lone wolf. He does not travel in a pack, doesn't take orders and definitely doesn't play well with others.

While Typhoon is a pretty straightforward take on that formula, it embraces its hero back into the fold of the Korean Navy, from which he was promoted to the "Executive Branch" when the going gets tough. Invisible Target, also complicates the stock plot by saddling our renegade (Nicolas Tse) with a straight-laced idealist (Jaycee Chan, Jackie's son) and a....um...well, the synopsis on the box describes him as "a veteran" cop (Shawn Yue) but Yue is in his late '20s so I don't think that's quite right. He's more like the middleman-not quite dark enough to be the renegade but not naïve enough to be the idealist.

In Invisible Target, the renegade, like any good bad cop, wants revenge against the baddy (Jacky Wu), revenge for having killed his fiancé but to do so, he must put up with the idealist's whining ("Arrest him! Arrest him! Arrest him!" Why don't you arrest him?!) and the middleman's attempts to emulate his badass renegadeyness. It's hard being above the law and having groupies but somehow he manages.

Director and co-writer Benny Chan knows that the trick to making the renegade's quest for justice compelling is to stuff it with chases, fight scenes and explosions. Plot will just make the audience's head hurt-so wait, what's this about the baddy having been betrayed by some dirty cops? Aw, who cares?! That building just blew up after, like, 30 grenades just detonated!-so just toss it in there for the sake of shits and giggles. The result is a showcase for some terrific fight scenes with lots of S.E.K.S.: Shooting, Exploding, Kicking and Shattering glass.

What brings the story periodically to a stand-still is that it's impossible to take our renegade seriously when he's as young as Tse is. Chan may look like the youngest of the group thanks to his baby face but he's only two years younger than Tse and one younger than Yue.

All three look so smart in their tailored brand-name clothing but none of them look like they're old enough to be having all that S.E.K.S. Renegades are older, bulkier men. They wear wife-beaters, have pony-tails and damnit, they have real facial hair, not that stupid fuzzy peach, goatee [bullshit]! The kids are all right but they are not bad enough to be renegades.

Typhoon likewise comes up just short of realizing its C-grade potential and winds up becoming a slightly more politically aware Steven Seagal film. The renegade this time (Jung-Jae Lee) takes down the baddy (Dong-Kun Jang) because his country needs their government-sanctioned rebel to stop a disastrous event that would rival the destruction of Chernobyl. That's at least a couple of notches above stopping fatcats from covering up a toxic [dump]. Choke on that, Seagal!

The baddy is a hideous academic monster whose terror comes from a back-story ripped out of a textbook and is amplified by the Seagalesque script to new heights of villainous mustache-twirling. As a young Chinese-Korean refugee, he was denied entry into South Korea and then summarily forced to watch as Chinese soldiers brutally murdered his parents and all his other fellow refugees. Twenty years later, he wants to avenge his lost innocence by dumping several loads of nuclear waste onto as many South Koreans as he can.

Our renegade responds in kind by hitting the baddy where it hurts most: his family. He kidnaps his foe's now nearly blind sister and holds her ransom. This renegade means business and stoically replies to all of the P.O.-ed nomad's threats with conditions of his own. He won't negotiate with terrorists. He's the renegade.

Somewhere leading up to the part where the baddy says, "You know what's so fucked up about this? We actually understand each other," the renegade loses his bite and becomes a team player. His days of kidnapping and destroying the baddy's henchmen's getaway car end right after the Navy sends in several squads and a submarine to back-up the renegade for his final fight. Somehow, a mano-a-mano knife fight surrounded by rising water and big explosions doesn't make for a very climactic showdown when there are torpedoes backing your guy up.

Still, there was something genuinely exciting about the way Typhoon initially hit the ground running and how Invisible Target threw caution to the wind and stacked action scene upon action scene. For those brief, shining moments, they made their renegades seem like real manly men and not the pantywaists that their goatees or spic-and-span Navy uniforms made them out to be.

Maybe it's finally time for the renegade to quietly disappear from the silver screen and find his place among society. Or maybe that's just a sissy excuse. Maybe we just need to wait a little longer for a new badass to rise. After all, you know what they say: Chuck Norris doesn't sleep. He waits.