As the film opens, Michael is forced to escape from his creators when they decided to terminate the dangerous project and all of the 701's. Michael goes into hiding and tries to live a quiet life as a librarian named Simon, that is, until the other former 701 s begin murdering Hong Kong's biggest drug lords. While the plot is rather thin and unoriginal, it is just enough of a springboard from which to launch the film's stunning martial arts fighting sequences. There are a few noticeable defects in the print, however there is little evidence of film grain to distract the viewer. The transfer itself is sharp, detailed and should prove most impressive to fans of Hong Kong action movies.
Colors are vivid and are cleanly reproduced without any bothersome chroma noise or distortion.
Blacks are very accurate, and there is a good level of shadow detail. Digital compression artifacts remain in check throughout the presentation. Of course, the soundtrack is dubbed into English, which gave the film's American distributors the opportunity to create the track from scratch. Anyway, the English dubbed soundtrack has a great mix that fully utilizes the discrete nature of Dolby Digital to bounce sound effects all around the soundstage, including into the split surround channels. The mix is a whole lot of fun, although the track's excessive reliance urban music gets on one's nerves after a while.