YMMV / A Taste of Killing and Romance

• Complete Monster: Wong Cheung, a sadistic killer who enjoys his job a little too much, serves as the Foil to protagonist Ko-sau. Introduced in a routine assignment to silence a witness's family, Wong had the witness's mother killed slowly by smothering via cling wrap, before killing the witness's young daughter by force-feeding the child soap detergent, and for good measure shoving the child's puppy into a washing machine with the spin cycle turned on. Seeing Ko-sau as a Worthy Opponent, Wong seeks to lure Ko out for a direct challenge, by killing a cop and torturing one of Ko's associates into revealing Ko's next hit, and then stabbing the associate to death despite promising to release her. After brutally killing his own superior, Ice, by strangling her with gym equipment, Wong then kidnaps Ko's protégé-cum-Love Interest Yu-feng to lure Ko into a direct confrontation. Slicing off two of Yu-feng's fingers to torture her, Wong shoots her non-fatally in the shoulder before stepping on her wounds to intimidate Ko with her screams. When their eventual confrontation is interrupted by the Marine police, Wong shoots Ko-sau dead right as he is reunited with Yu-feng.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The out-of-nowhere love story between Ko-sau and Yu-feng which takes up most of the film's second act really slows the film down to a halt.