We at Fridae have always loved Johnny To's films. Ever since John Woo left Hong Kong to carve a successful career in Hollywood, Johnny To has picked up the slack and become the best action director in Hong Kong. His best gangsteramas like Election and The Mission are masterpieces of action cinema. Even misfires like Exiled were enjoyable B-grade action flicks.

So to watch Johnny latest film Linger, a slow and monotonous supernatural romance, is to experience serious disappointment.

Former F4 member Vic Chou plays a boy who cheats on his girlfriend with the attractive, tomboyish-looking Li Bingbing. The romantic triangle frustrates him so that he crashes her car into a motorcycle and dies. Three years later (why the wait?), Vic returns as a ghost to taunt Bingbing into telling him if she ever loved him. Bleaaah...

As the lead, Vic Chou is simply too whiny and ineffective to make the cliched romantic lines work. (The same lines in the mouth of Takeshi Kaneshiho would have been a different matter altogether.) Linger moves at such a glacially slow pace that it became struggle just to keep awake throughout much of its routine scenarios.

Yes, Vic does appear shirtless, but it's really not that big a deal.