For Hong Kong action auteurs in the '90s, all roads to Hollywood led through Jean-Claude Van Damme. First, there was John Woo's Hard Target, a standard Van Damme vehicle propped up by intermittently dazzling slo-mo mayhem, albeit nothing on a level with the balletic gunplay of Woo's The Killer or Hard-Boiled. Ringo Lam (City On Fire) followed with Maximum Risk, a rote actioner that lived up to the direct-to-video anonymity of its title. But it wasn't until the one-two punch of 1997's Double Team and 1998's Knock Off that Hong Kong's heightened unreality was imported duty-free, courtesy of director Tsui Hark, who had made a name for himself with period martial-arts films like Peking Opera Blues and Once Upon A Time In China. Poised somewhere between high camp and inspired delirium, Hark's American work was greeted with bafflement, if not outright contempt. But who would soon forget the heroic wall of Coke machines at the Roman Coliseum in Double Team—arguably the greatest and most gratuitous product plug in cinema history? Or Knock Off's uproarious rickshaw race, with Rob Schneider driving Van Damme forward by popping him in the butt with an eel? Marking his return to Hong Kong after his brief excursion in Hollywood, Hark's Time And Tide counts as a minor letdown, perhaps because he's no longer out of his element, playfully contorting the formula banalities expected of him. With no opposing force to rein him in, he dispenses with such mundane concerns as plot and characterization, and allows his kinetic visual style to take over, a strategy that's exhilarating shot-by-shot, but crushingly dull over the long haul. The story, such as it goes, follows the adventures of Nicholas Tse, a streetwise young man who takes a job at a shady bodyguard service to support a policewoman he impregnated during a night of drunken revelry. He dreams of retiring to a remote South American beach, but South America comes to him instead, in the form of a mercenary group of professional killers from Brazil. A gold star for anyone who can figure out what happens from there, because any trace of coherency is lost in the chaos of freeze-frames, split-screens, jump cuts, slow motion, and whiplash camerawork. Hark seems to plan one sequence at a time, with no thought as to how dozens of them might fit together. For all the boundless imagination on display in individual segments of Time And Tide—a camera move inside the chamber of a loaded gun, a car trip to the airport in reverse, a woman giving birth while engaging in a shootout—the totality will leave audiences feeling like overstimulated children, wrung-out and exhausted.