Released to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of Hong Kong's return to China, Ann Hui's  "Our Time Will Come" tells the story of two people caught up in the city's occupation by Japanese forces during World War II: Fang Lan, AKA Fang Gu, as played by Zhou Xun and Liu Henzai, AKA Blackie Lau, as played by Eddie Peng (credited under his full name of Eddie Peng Yuyan). 

Fang was a schoolteacher, and Liu was an insurgent working for one of the many insurgent groups. Just as the split in professions is vast, so are the two sides of the story and while it's trite, if honest, to say that one side is good and the other is bad, it's perhaps even more honest to say one side is an Ann Hui movie and the other, most definitely, is not.

Hui is one of the world's most prolific and successful female filmmakers, with a career that stretches back into the 1970s and encompasses TV series and documentaries as well as feature films, and across that, she has developed into an auteur interested in telling personal, intimate stories. 

Her most famous film (in the West, at least) is "A Simple Life", a two-hander starring Andy Lau and Deanie Ip as a wealthy film producer and his family's longstanding Ayi respectively. Described favorably as the Asian answer to Michael Haneke's "Amour", it tells a sad, sweet and, yes, simple story of personal connection.

The poster for that movie shows the leads talking over a bowl of noodles, which is apt, as it's in these moments that Hui's talent comes out. The highlights of "Our Time Will Come" all involve well-observed scenarios, such as Fang and Liu secretly sharing a bag of black-eyed pea dumplings and the quotidian complaints of intellectuals fleeing the Japanese forces into unoccupied territory. 

This gives these portions of "Our Time Will Come" a lived-in feeling and Hui's generosity with her camera, which lingers on the actors, captures the subtlety of the performances. 

It's here where the Haneke comparisons really make sense, only instead of the observational style being a mode deployed with surgical precision to terrorize the audience, it's used by Hui to convey life under occupation without bludgeoning the point; glances, whispers and the briefest of touches are all the humanity the citizens of Hong Kong are either allowed to show or all they have left.

Alas, the story of Blackie Lau contains none of this humanity, nor does it contain any real believability. Much like subplot involving The Razor in Wong Kar-wai's "The Grandmaster", which is also set in China during World War II, Blackie's story is action heavy and designed to specifically work as a counterpoint to the rest of "Our Time Will Come"; Fang is living under occupation, Blackie is fighting it. However, the tenderness of Hui's filmmaking doesn't apply to gunfights, meaning the action scenes are clumsily shot and bizarrely anachronistic. 

For a story supposedly based on true events, Blackie seems as if he has stepped out of a pulp novel. His skill with a pistol verges on gunkata and his methods of espionage rival Ethan Hunt and James Bond in terms of secrecy; in one scene, he crashes a meeting of local law enforcement and complains that the bounty on his head is too low - and then kills them all in ways that would make John Woo proud.

Peng is one of Chinese cinema's brightest stars and has proven himself dramatically before in movies such as "Cold War" and, most recently, the cult hit "Duckweed", but he's also started to fashion a screen presence of being an undercover badass, as seen in "Operation Mekong" and "Call of Heroes", suggesting that Blackie Lau was intended to be a continuation of the type of role he enjoys to play, only it couldn't have been a worse fit.

As the film progresses, Peng's plotline becomes more prominent, and by the time it fully intertwines with that of Zhou, whose character takes far too long to do the inevitable, it's too little too late and undercuts what came before. 

As does the repeated interstitial moments of Ben, a cab driver in contemporary Hong Kong played by Tony Leung Ka Fai, whose black-and-white reminisces are intended to provide a real-life basis for the story, only, besides for emphasising just how recent the Japanese occupation was, otherwise serve to distract from the rest of the movie.

Compared to Kim Jee-woon's sprawling spy saga of "The Age of Shadows", which tells a similar story of resistance against Japanese occupation, this time set in 1920s Seoul, "Our Time Will Come" seems inchoate, as if the action heavy portions were added later in production to make the film more exciting instead of being integral to the process to begin with. 

There's a lot to like in "Our Time Will Come", but it's difficult to see that undermined knowing everyone involved has done better elsewhere.