To the Fore (2015)

Plot summary (story synopsis):

Ming (Eddie Peng) and Tian (Shawn Dou) are rookie professional race cyclists. They join the Radiant team where Ji-won (Si Won Choi) is the lead racer. Ming and Tian fall for the same girl - fellow cyclist Shiyao (Wang Luodan). Shiyao chooses Ming but Ming is unfaithful to her and Tian steps in to pick up the slack. But Tian has problems of his own.

After various successes and defeats, Ming and Tian end up as rivals on different teams and suffer career setbacks. Finally, Ming and Tian team up again and race against Ji-won.

***

To the Fore is a crowd-pleaser. Following the Simpson-Bruckheimer blockbuster formula of action (racing) for the guys and romance for the girls, To the Fore delivers as a date movie. It is 70 percent hardcore cycling pseudo-documentary and 30 percent drama/love triangle.

Writer/director Dante Lam (with co-writers Silver Hau and Fung Lam) shows good judgment by starting off the movie with a quick series of exciting bicycle races, slowly easing in the relationship drama later on. The beautifully-filmed races grab our attention within the first few minutes and helps to establish the authenticity of the movie's world and its characters.

The races aren't just fancy camerawork either. The tactics, training and equipment are shown in detail, lending interest and believability to the proceedings. The race settings are stunning - mountain roads, desert, city streets, indoor and outdoor velodromes. This is the kind of movie you can rewatch in the background on your second PC monitor with the sound turned down low, while you work on your main monitor.

Even when the drama gets started, the scenes are kept short and are inserted in between even more bicycle races, so the movie never bogs down. An example of good storytelling judgment - there's a cute scene where Ming and Tian compete by balancing on bicycles without moving. They bet dinner over who falls first, then the movie cuts away to the next scene and doesn't bother to show who won. Quick and to the point - the point is their friendly but still real rivalry, not who won.

There's also some good-natured (not mean) slapstick humor, which works. The crowd in my theater was happily chuckling along.

I almost gave this movie a miss but was persuaded by the cycling scenes in the movie trailer. The trailer doesn't lie. The movie really does look this good. Given today's improved camera mounts, it actually looks better than director Peter Yates's (Bullitt) classic Breaking Away from 1979. To the Fore's script is more formulaic than Steve Tesich's quirky coming-of-age script for Breaking Away, but it still entertains.