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Description
Any connection to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror tale is tenuous at best in this action-packed superhero story with dark undertones. Adam Baldwin is San Francisco surgeon Henry Jekyll, whose honeymoon in Hong Kong becomes a nightmare when a triad gang murders his wife and marks him for death. Saved by a mysterious Chinese healer who speaks in fortune cookie clichés, he becomes a kind of hero-in-training (think The Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi) with a mystic twist: he discovers the herbal formula to release his inner brute and transforms into a demonic-looking Hyde. The colorful mix of cop show, gangster thriller, and mystic martial arts adventure ends on an anticlimactic note, as if this made-for-TV feature was the pilot for a never-launched TV series, but it's an energetic and spirited film that, for all its kooky clichés, remains oddly compelling. --Sean Axmaker
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