In the Storm (2022)

What did I watch?

Man I’ m gonna come out and say it. I hated this drama. I don’t know how it got the score it did but I found this to be so bad it was hilarious. You have great actors in this drama from the Raymonds, Lam and Wong, as well as Hugo Ng and Lawrence Ng! And yet somehow this drama just falls flat on its face.

The first thing to call out is the terrible intro sequence. We have a great song sang by Raymond Lam, but the video editor decided to allow the voices of the actors reading their lines to periodically play over the intro. Why do that? Why ruin a good intro song?

Then we have the two main leads played by the Raymonds. Lam is with the police crime unit and Wong is with the ICAC. They were best buds growing up but a misunderstanding led to them constantly bickering and fighting each other whenever they were onscreen at the same time. You knew if they were both onscreen together, there would be an argument, and yes this occurred all the time and it got really old really fast.

Why the anger? Because when they were young they had a Kendo competition, and Wong drank some lemon tea that he thought was given to him by Lam and had a tummy ache. This tummy ache led to Wong losing to Lam in the final bout, so Wong has spent the entire time thinking Lam spiked his tea.

I’ll spoil it all for you here. The big bad is Lawrence Ng. He is Wong’s boss as head of ICAC and the Kendo master for both Wong and Lam. He comes across as a nice guy and full of wisdom and wishing for peace between both Raymonds, but we later find out it was all a ruse. He was the secret behind-the-scenes big boss making all the other people do bad things to make money, and controlling them by having dirt on their misdeeds and threatening to release the dirt if they misbehaved. So why is Lawrence so evil? This was because he said something wrong to someone and that person prevented him from progressing in his career no matter what he did. This annoyed him so much that he wanted to always be the one in control, so he started a crime syndicate in order to get dirt on people and control them. What? And if you thought that motivation was lame, guess how Wong got his tummy ache from the lemon tea? It was Lawrence who arranged it in the past. Why? Because he wanted to feel in control. What the actual f? That was so stupid!

That nonsense plus the bad cgi effects, Chrissie Chau’s terrible acting and the annoying af Oscar Leung, and you have the recipe for a bad drama that only just survives thanks to the star power of Raymond Lam. Damn.

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