Once a Thief
Once a Thief
PG | 29 September 1996 (USA)
Once a Thief Trailers

Set in Hong Kong and Vancouver, the story follows Mac Ramsey and Li Ann Tsei, lovers and professional thieves who are separated while fleeing the powerful Hong Kong underworld crime lord who raised and trained them. After being imprisoned in Hong Kong, Mac is forcefully recruited into a clandestine international crime-fighting unit by a hard-nosed, menacing Director. He is teamed in Vancouver with Li Ann, who thought Mac was dead, and her new fiancé Victor Mansfield, an ex-cop who is attracted to the unorthodox methods of the agency. Conflict flares between Mac and Victor as the trio take on their assignment. They soon learn that their principal target is their foster brother Michael Tang, who had been given Li Ann as his future wife and who has vowed to hunt down the pair for their disloyalty to the "family".

Reviews
Ehirerapp

Waste of time

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Lollivan

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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Lela

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

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Candida

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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kale854

Yeah, it sucks, but it's one of those movies that gives you that warm and happy feeling, that you can only get when two supposedly heterosexual men are DEFINITELY into each other. Seriously, if you didn't see them, watch it again. The homo erotic undertones are there. Esp. with The Bite as my sister has taken to calling it. Of course Lee Ann had to be there to mess with everything.I realize very few people know anything about this movie, as it was pretty obscure, so I shall sum up. There are three 'siblings' named Mac, Lee Ann, and Micheal. Micheal is the biological son of a Chinese mob boss, and Lee Ann and Mac were adopted into 'The Family' Mac and Micheal are both in love with Lee Ann, but Micheal gets permission from his father to marry her. Micheal is a slimy little jerk, and honestly, the guy who plays him can't act... at all, I don't know his name, because all I really worry about are Mac and Vic (Ivan Sergei, and Nicholas Lea *heart*). So anyway, Mac and Lee Ann try to run away, Lee Ann escapes and Mac ends up in prison. That = exposition. I hope I've peeked your interest at least a little. Great movie. Rent it.

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behemoth-7

Very bad acting combined with an utterly unbelievable chain of events lacking any kind of coherency and spiced with one of the worst dialogue I've ever encountered. This was actually pretty bad even for a purely television production.At times the "movie" felt like a group of stuntmen rehearsing for a neat action flick. At times the dialogue and cinematographic choices made me feel like I was watching a bad soap.The effects were overblown and yet looked cheapish. Shooting scenes had a faint of the usual John Woo in them, but there was no coherent force that would have made the scenes fit with each other or lend them a shred of believability.Stealing the Rembrandt painting and creating a duplicate of it (in such a short time!) was the absolute worst this movie put in front of my eyes. It just kept on going and going ... and going ... with those dudes hanging in the chandelier.While I've watched and liked a number of Woo movies, this is (so far) the absolute worst of his I've encountered.

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imelda-2

This is the best double episode of Once a Thief. Nick Lea is the best of the cast and his performance is very good. The talent of Ivan Sergei and Sandrine Holt is undeniable and the story is very interesting.I think that all fans of John Woo must see this episode.

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Fruhead

Once a Thief was a pretty good show and I was sorry to see it go off the air. It was a really good show for a Canadian show and had a excellent lineup of actors.True, the plots were just rip-offs of many other TV shows but I think that is just part of the show itself. The slogan of the show was "The art of violence, the art of romance, the art of action" which fits it perfectly.The show is a humorous show with a few serious overtones to make it interesting. And ANY good show does a few ripoffs of other shows, but I agree that OAT did it a bit too much.

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