While it met with modest success, Roboforce is a rather silly film. Director David Chung taps squarely into the giddily silly and often shrilly hysteric slapstick vein that runs through much of Hong Kong light entertainment. There’s a promisingly adept opening with the giant robot bursting out of a bank and past a cordon of armed police amid much mass destruction, which is contrasted with the comic relief of Tony Chiu-Wei Leung’s reporter who keeps dropping his camera every time he gets a perfect shot. Alas this slapstick element almost entirely comes to dominate the film. It is all inane slapstick down around the level of custard pie fights – John Sham getting on a scooter and pedalling with his feet, scenes with police accidentally getting the handcuffs on the wrong people, Tsui Hark thinking the robot version of Sally Yeh is her trying to reconcile with him as she demolishes most his apartment in an attempt to kill him. The height of inanity is the scenes where John Sham reprograms the Maria robot with the codeword “I love Loony” and he and Tsui Hark keep superseding each other’s commands and getting the robot to turn and attack the other, and various scenes with them being electrocuted, dragged behind a car and eventually dumped into a portable toilet. None of this is helped by the characters who are idiotic one-dimensional caricatures, the cartoonish sound effects and the terribly flat English-language dubbing.

On the plus side, the action sequences are directed by Tsui Hark’s frequent collaborator Ching Siu-Tung, who made the fabulous A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) and sequels and has directed action sequences on just about every fantastic Hong Kong film ever made. It is Ching Siu-Tung who makes Roboforce worth watching, turning it almost into something akin to a live-action version of Inspector Gadget (1983-5). There are a lot of quite entertaining sequences with the female robot popping missiles out of its arm and firing her detachable hands after people. The attack on the church has a wonderfully entertaining, pure Ching-esque sequence with Tsui Hark Tarzan-swinging through a forest on a vine, pursued by a whole gang of thugs who are also swinging on vines after him at the same time as firing machine guns. The battle between Maria and the massive Dominator robot is entertaining (although it seems to demolish so many walls that one wonders how the building they are fighting in continues to remain standing). And there’s a rather entertaining climax with the robot Maria flying in and saving a falling man by catching him on her back, then snatching missiles in her bare hands and turning them around to fire back at oncoming missiles, the villains beating her with metal pipes, she firing her detachable fists and feet around the warehouse, and various others using cannons to propel themselves across the other side of the room. This is all rather entertaining in a kind of cartoonish way, but ultimately it is the silly slapstick element that fatally weakens Roboforce.