Beach Spike – Review

Beach Spike is a 2011 Hong Kong film directed by Tony Tang. The film involves a female beach volleyball teams with martial arts skills. It has a proposed cast of veteran actors Bolo Yeung and Ronald Cheng along with the female leads of Theresa Fu, Chrissie Chau, Phoenix Chou and Ankie Beilke. The wealthy Bu family has plans to have the beach made into a playground for the rich and getting rid of the youth at the beach. Mrs. Bu’s two daughters, Natalie and Phoenix challenge Sharon and Rachel to a volleyball match. If the two local girls enter and win the upcoming All Hong Kong Women’s Volleyball tournament, Mrs. Bu will revise her plans to further develop the area.

Of course a film with half naked women will appeal to me but we all know how films like this play out. The sports portion is also unremarkable, with little tension leading up to the final game. So in terms of plot and actual tension, this film falls flat on its face. In fact, it kind of plays out like an old American film from the early 90s where cheese is apparant in every frame. In addition to the shoddy acting it seems the budget was cut short as well as many scenes featured low lighting and mediocre cinematography.

The movie is actually much better if you perhaps fast forward the dialogue scenes and jump straight to the volleyball games. What is sad though is I caught on that the volleyball is actually CG. What a bummer! Each spike is simple enough fun, and if approached as such, but a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ film it is definitely not. Finally, throw in the classic Romeo and Juliet subplot, where love crosses the line in the sand, and you have a recipe for a thrilling sports romance. Not! Beach Spike is the live-action feature debut of animator Tony Tang, who previously directed the actress Chrissie Chau in a television commercial where she rips open her office outfit to reveal herself in a bikini. High brow stuff here guys.

Beach Spike was released in Hong Kong on July 7, 2011. It was the fourth highest grossing film in the Hong Kong box office on its opening week. Perhaps even HK knew to stay away from this film, yet I didn’t receive the memo in time. But speaking of illegibility, the subtitles were an absolute howl, rife with errors. My favorite involves the misspelling of a specific word through juxtaposition of the two middle letters such that the resulting word is wrong but not misspelled. Given the context, it makes for a very funny joke. Which is basically what this entire film is the whole time; One. Big. Joke.