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It takes just the first shot to get sucked into Breaking News, the latest bit of destruction from mayhem master Johnnie To, and it's a doozy.

Taut, cynical thriller.

The movie is one of To's typically tangled meditations on the smearing of good and evil, in moments where instinct overcomes morality. And ultimately, To cares less about the motivations of opposing forces than about the spectacular collisions they produce.

Prolific Hong Kong lenser Johnnie To delivers another solid action picture with this latest effort, a cops and robbers yarn with social commentary mixed in along the way.

It's a slam-dunk of an opener in a film filled with terrifically choreographed action and very little on its mind.

An interesting idea comes over only half-formed in Johnnie To's Breaking News, an effective Hong Kong crimer that partly returns to the realistic style of some of his late '90s dramas, but never properly knits its theme of media manipulation into pic's punchy thriller format.

Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry.