Gen Y Cops - Edison Chen (2000) - Lantau Link

Here's one I was going to do years ago and then just forgot about (because it's not very good) but seeing as Paul Rudd (aka Ant Man) is in the cast with some very dodgy blonde highlights (we used to call them "streaks" when I was at school), then perhaps now is the time to roll this one out. The story is a follow up to Gen X Cops minus Nicholas Tse and with Edison Chen brought in as a replacement. He's not someone you see in films anymore thanks to his indiscretion that led to the Edison Chen photo scandal back in 2008. It was all over the news at the time and ended (at least for a while) quite a few careers. 

Anyway, in this movie the intrepid cops Match (Stephen Fung), Alien (Sam Lee) and...erm...Edison (Chen) join forces to track down a hacker who has taken over an FBI robot. Rudd plays one of the FBI agents, along with Maggie Q, sent to Hong Kong to ensure its demonstration at the "Hong Kong International Exhibition of Police Technology" goes according to plan. Spoiler alert, it doesn't.

The film's Hong Kong story starts with Match and Alien driving along the Tsing Ma Bridge in a borrowed Ferrari, on their way to try and meet up with an undercover cop, Edison. The first image below was taken on the Tsing Ma bridge section of the Lantau Link (between Tsing Yi and Ma Wan), but the middle image is of the Kap Shui Mun bridge section between Ma Wan and Lantau Island. The lower image was actually filmed as the car goes back the other way across the Tsing Ma Bridge.

Push - Chris Evans (2009) - Lantau Link Visitors Centre, Tsing Yi

Kira makes her bid for escape in the toilet at the Lantau Link Visitors Centre. I've not actually been here yet, its location is very much biased towards people with cars (the only public bus service is an hourly green minibus - limited to 16 seats - caught from Maritime Square) but will make the effort at some point to see what is on show. Until then we will have to make do with some screen grabs from Push. I must admit to being most curious about whether or not these are the real toilets at the centre.

Ting Kau Bridge in the background

Largo Winch - Tomer Sisley (2008) - Car Chase - various Locations around Hong Kong

The car race back to HK Island takes in a fair amount of territory, some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't. I've included them all in one post because I don't think many of them are worthy of a single post.

Of course, we have just left Sunny Bay and are now racing along the Lantau Link back towards Kowloon and Hong Kong, so it's no surprise to see that the Tsing Ma Bridge makes a brief appearance. Well actually, the top picture shows the lesser known Kap Shui Mun bridge which spans the gap between Ma Wan and Lantau Island. You can tell the difference by the fewer number of crossbars across the uprights.

Coincidentally, just a few days ago the Kap Shui Mun bridge was struck by an illegally travelling Chinese registered ship that was too high to make it under the span. The top of the ship hit the underside of the span and caused a rather unprecedented shutdown of the only road and rail link in and out of the airport. The place was crippled for several hours and it almost reminded me of being back in the UK for a moment when a small amount of snow falls on the roads, or the wrong kind of leaf falls on a railway track.

Anyway, it seems the bridge is fine but the news that came out of it (news for me at least) is that there is currently an undersea tunnel being constructed from Tuen Mun to Lantau - no doubt it is being created for the purpose of linking up with the HK-Macau-Zhuhai bridge under construction, but the added benefit being that things won't grind to a halt if some crazy dude decides top crash his boat into one of the bridges.

Moving on and all of a sudden we see a brief shot of Sai Ying Pun implying the car is now racing along this part of HK Island. I guess he must've taken the Western Harbour Tunnel because that small funny looking blue building in the bottom of the screen grab is in fact one of the ventilation buildings for said tunnel. Here is where Google's new 3D view of HK can be useful, because I have been able to match the angle. The quality of the rendering in Google is pretty good.

The new development you can see at the bottom of the Google 3D view is the Sun Yat Sen memorial Park which opened in 2010 - a couple of years after filming.

Next up is where the geography goes a bit awry and we see Largo's car speeding eastwards along Gloucester Road in Wanchai. You can see the brown curved facade of the Luk Kwok Hotel on the left.

Just when you thought things were getting confusing, we then get another aerial view, this time of the Canal Road flyover back in Causeway Bay at the other end of Wanchai. Again, the Google 3D allows a fairly good recreation of the camera angle for no useful reason other than because I like doing it.

Contagion - Matt Damon (2011) - Tsing Ma Bridge, Tsing Yi

An easy spot this one and probably familiar to anyone who has visited Hong Kong since 1998 will have passed over this bridge at least once.

Judging by the angle, it seems as though the filmmakers pulled in some favours and actually managed to get the camera up onto one of the uprights of the bridge.

Here is a similar angle I took from the Tsing Yi Nature Trail a couple of years ago. It's pretty high from up there but I think confirms that the filmmakers did in fact make it up the actual bridge (or perhaps used a drone). Anyway, an impressive view from either angle.