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Hong Kong thriller ‘Three’ wraps a tedious medical drama around a great action climax

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Three

Two and a half stars

Three Zhao Wei, Louis Koo, Wallace Chung. Directed by Johnnie To. Not rated. Opens Friday at AMC Town Square.

Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To is both extremely prolific and extremely versatile; he’s directed everything from romantic comedies and musicals to superhero and martial arts movies in his nearly 40-year career. In the U.S., he’s best known for stylish thrillers like Election, Exiled and 2013’s excellent Drug War, and his new feature Three has the setup of another suspenseful crime story: After being shot in the head by a cop, the leader of a gang of armed robbers is rushed to the hospital, where he toys with authorities by refusing potentially life-saving brain surgery and withholding information about his gang’s next attack.

In practice, though, most of Three is a circuitous, tedious morality play combined with hospital melodrama, as it focuses on dedicated neurosurgeon Dr. Tong (Zhao Wei) and her patients, of whom the unnamed devious criminal (Wallace Chung) is only one. The entire movie takes place inside the hospital, most of it within a single ward where the criminal is being held, and where other patients cause a variety of mostly weak comic-relief mishaps. The core of the story is an ongoing stand-off among Dr. Tong, police Inspector Chen (Louis Koo) and the criminal, who delights in taunting both his captors and the medical staff with his cavalier attitude toward his own life and his penchant for philosophical quotations.

Chung is entertaining as the sadistic criminal, but Zhao and Koo can’t bring much depth to their characters’ respective moral dilemmas (Chen is a dirty cop who bends the rules in the name of doing the right thing). Just as the movie is starting to feel like a tiresome journey to nowhere, though, To pulls out a bravura climax, as the hospital explodes in a massive shoot-out between the criminal gang and the various cops stationed around the building. It’s a stunning piece of action choreography, featuring a combination of slow and fast motion achieved by having the actors literally move at slower speeds while the bullets fly around them at normal velocity, and big parts of it are shot in impressive single takes. For a few minutes, Three is as kinetic and exciting as any of To’s best-known work; after that, it settles back into its lull of strained humor and overwrought emotions for an anticlimactic ending that’s disappointingly characteristic of the movie as a whole.

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