‘The Viral Factor’ had a budget of 17 million dollars, according to IMDB. I’m amazed the budget was so small, because the movie plays like it cost three or four times that much. Most of the action takes place in Kuala Lumpur, which makes a pretty great backdrop for shenanigans like helicopter chases. I’ve heard director Dante Lam referred to as the Hong Kong Michael Bay, and the comparison is not without some merit. He does make glossy, loud and implausible action films. He does cut the action choppy enough that sometimes you can get a little lost. He does use soap-opera level melodrama to string the action scenes together.

But Michael Bay couldn’t make a Pepsi commercial for 17 million dollars. True fact. I have no idea what Lam could do with a couple hundred million, but I suspect he’ll be offered the chance.

The story is pretty involved, but I can give you the major points.

Our hero is a paramilitary cop type – he works for some international agency like Interpol or the Impossible Mission Force. In the line of duty, he catches a bullet in the head. The docs can’t take it out, and he’s told he only has a few weeks to live. He goes home to Beijing to spend his last days with his mother, who’s somehow dying of sciatica. She makes him some soup and then drops a huge melodrama bomb about the status of our hero’s father and older brother. She begs him to go to Malaysia and make peace. He does, and within hours of his arrival in KL, shit gets extremely hectic. Through coincidences that don’t bear contemplation, out hero finds himself neck deep in a plot involving weaponized smallpox, crooked cops and ridiculously evil JV Bond villians.

There are tears, and explosions, and a lot of running with very focused faces. It’s quality carnage, and I enjoyed that enough to kind of let the sappy stuff slide.

‘The Viral Factor’ is playing in very limited release in US theaters right now, and I don’t know how long it’s gonna stick around. If this sounds like your cup of tea, check it out. If you get nothing else out of it, you’ll get to see Jay Chou redeem himself for ‘The Green Hornet’.