Metacritic Film

Breaking News

Starring Kelly Chen, Nick Cheung, Siu-Fai Cheung, Shiu Hung Hui, Suet Lam, Richie Ren, Maggie Siu, Simon Yam, and Yong You

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Palm Pictures
Action  |  Crime  |  Drama  |  Foreign
90 minutes | Color
Hong Kong / China
Released In Theaters January 27, 2006

In this fast-moving action drama, a highly televised police bust of a Hong Kong bank heist end with the criminals getting away and a lot of cops getting killed. In an effort to save face with the public, the police arrange to broadcast the pursuit and capture of the crooks. However, things get more complicated when the bank robbers contact the media with their own version of events. (Palm Pictures)

WRITTEN BY
Hing-Ka Chan
Tin-Shing Yip

DIRECTED BY
Johnny To

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

63 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 The Onion (A.V. Club)
The movie is one of To's typically tangled meditations on the smearing of good and evil, in moments where instinct overcomes morality. And ultimately, To cares less about the motivations of opposing forces than about the spectacular collisions they produce.
75 TV Guide
Taut, cynical thriller.
75 San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson
It takes just the first shot to get sucked into Breaking News, the latest bit of destruction from mayhem master Johnnie To, and it's a doozy.
70 The Hollywood Reporter
Prolific Hong Kong lenser Johnnie To delivers another solid action picture with this latest effort, a cops and robbers yarn with social commentary mixed in along the way.
60 Variety
An interesting idea comes over only half-formed in Johnnie To's Breaking News, an effective Hong Kong crimer that partly returns to the realistic style of some of his late '90s dramas, but never properly knits its theme of media manipulation into pic's punchy thriller format.
60 The New York Times
It's a slam-dunk of an opener in a film filled with terrifically choreographed action and very little on its mind.
50 Village Voice Ed Halter
Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry.

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