Twins Mission

Another Twins movie, another 90 minutes of unbridled lunacy.

“You don’t know that there are girl and boy twins?”

In the past I’ve looked at the films of Cantopop duo Twins, marvelling at their strangeness but overall enjoying them fine. While I understand that pop star is almost synonymous with actor in Hong Kong, both previous Twins films have made a point of starring the musical group and not Charlene Choi and Gillian Cheung as individuals. Twins Effect and Twins Effect II often pit our two leads against each other, or kept them apart for large portions of the film which always seemed like a waste of a gimmick.

Enter Twins Mission, a film which is technically not part of the franchise but may as well be, from its name, to its batshit insane story to its complete waste of a Hong Kong martial arts legend. In Twins Mission, Choi and Cheung play actual twins (let’s ignore the fact that they don’t even look like sisters, let alone twins), working in the circus as trapeze artists. After two monks, Lau and Uncle Luck (Wu Jing and Sammo Hung, respectively) tasked with bringing a magical artefact to Hong Kong, lose their charge, the twins find themselves in the middle of a battle between good and evil gangs of twins in a bid to retrieve the Heaven’s Bead. Meanwhile, a little girl called Happy (Qiu Lier) has cancer and her sister Lillian (Jess Zhang) is trying to get her the help she needs. Her boss says the Heaven’s Bead is the only item that can help her, and plans to steal it for himself.

Twins Mission at times certainly feels like a harder film to follow than its predecessors, especially once the many, many sets of twins show up, but it also has more enjoyable moments. I can’t even begin to go over all the notes I took whenever something weird happened. Lau, the junior monk, goes into a hospital holding a toy truck and bumps into Lillian who happens to drive that model of truck. Then he shows up out of nowhere and asks her to drive his dying twin brother about, who then peacefully passes away. Uncle Luck protects himself from a falling pane of glass by throwing a coin into it, shattering it into millions of far deadlier shards. A man pretends to be his twin by adding a soul patch to his beard. It’s fucking ludicrous. And for a movie about a bunch of twins heisting some MacGuffin, it really shouldn’t be.

Twins Mission, despite its lack of vampires and misandrist empresses is by far the most out-there movie of the three. The twins-only cabal of thieves is such a wild idea that it removes all credibility from the very first scene. That the cabal splits into two factions of good and evil twins is even more insane. Throw in the magical healing bead and you end up with a film that genuinely feels like it’s lost its mind before we even get to the high-rise finale where a little girl is de- and then re-fenestrated. Still I don’t think any of this is meant to be taken seriously (and if it is, then holy shit we need to talk, movie). Twins Mission has several moments of pseudo-satire, and whenever a character refers to the Twins group, it’s hard not to read it as commentary on the Twins band – though most of that is unsatisfying and nonsensical.

At least the titular characters get more time to react and talk to each other in this one, allowing their on-stage chemistry to shine through, even if what they’re doing most of the time is bickering about who loves David Copperfield more, or biting down on CGI snakes guarding the magical Tibetan healing stone. All of this is capped off with a cliff hanger ending that is still, fourteen years later, unresolved. And it’s not that I particularly want this story to keep on going, but I’m also keen to see just how much more twins-based shenanigans they could have done before calling it a day.

Verdict: Unnecessarily complicated in places, Twins Mission is nonetheless still a pretty fun romp, when it isn’t being completely stupid.

Overall entertainment: 5.5/10
Violence: 6/10
Sex: 0/10
Cops: Fully pointless
Jellyfish: No, only snow!
Twins Mission Drinking Game: Take a shot whenever someone says the word “twins”
Broken glass: I think this movie even beats Police Story

Twins Mission (2007)
Also known as: 雙子神偸
Cantonese

Director: Kong Tao-Hoi
Writer: Fong-Sai Keung, Tsui Siu-Ming

CAST

Gillian Chung – Pearl
Charlene Choi – Jade
Sammo Hung – Uncle Luck
Wu Jing – Lau Hay (also his twin)
Yuen Wah – Chang Chung (also his twin)
Jess Zhang – Lilian Li
Steven Cheung – Fred
Qiu Lier – Happy
Sek Sau – Professor Mok
Sam Lee – Officer Lam
Andy Liang – Wan Pau
Cody Liang – Wan Lung
Mona – Mona
Lisa – Lisa
Ammar – Ahao
Long Fei – Kitten
Long Ze – Puppy
Albert Leung – Iron Head
Herbert Leung – Bronze Head
Lam Ho – Marco
Lam Kit – Polo
Liang Yueyun – Miao Kam Fung
Bobby Yip – Miao Yam Fung
Chen Hao