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Key-fung "Johnnie" To (China, 1955) debuted with Chengshi Tejing/ City Police/ The Big Heat (1988), produced by Tsui Hark,
and
Ba Xing Baoxi/ The Eighth Happiness (1988).
Alang De Gushi/ Alang's Story/ All About Ah-Long (1989) basically began the Triad saga and was his first
major hit.
Other films of the era include:
Tejing 90/ SWAT 90/ The Iron Butterfly (1989) and
The Iron Butterfly 2 (1990),
Ai de Shijie/ The World of Love/ The Story of My Son (1990),
Jixing Gong Zhao/ The Fun the Luck and the Tycoon (1990),
Zhizun Wu Shang II - Yong Ba Tianxia/ Casino Raiders II (1991), the third installment in the "Casino Raiders" saga,
Ti Dao Bao/ Lucky Encounter (1991),
and
Shen Si Guan/ Justice My Foot (1992) is a comedy.
Dong Fang San Xia/ The Heroic Trio (1993) and
Xian Dai Hao Xia Zhuan/ Executioners (1993) tell the story
of three women: a bounty hunter, an invisible woman, and a martial-arts cop.
Ji Gong/ The Mad Monk (1993) is a comedy set in Song Dynasty times.
The martial-arts epic The Bare-Footed Kid (1993) is a remake of
Chang Cheh's Disciples of Shaolin (1977).
After
the comedy Jigong/ The Mad Monk (1993),
the martial-arts movie Chijiao Xiaozi/ The Bare-Footed Kid (1993),
Wuwei Shentan/ Tasteless Detective/ Loving You (1995),
Tian Ruo Youqing III/ A Moment of Romance III (1996),
the third installment of a popular series that he had produced,
and
Lifeline (1997), a melodrama about heroic firefighters,
the prolific To
returned to the gangster genre:
Chan Sam Ying Hung/ True Heart Hero/ A Hero Never Dies (1998) tells the story of two
gangsters who are betrayed by their bosses, a similar setting as
John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986), but
the shootout scenes are mostly tedious (and the final one is wildly implausible) and the humor feels childish.
Siu Keung Cheng's stylish cinematography is by far the real attraction.
A triad boss, Yam, is being scolded by an old fortune teller for not being
able to win the war against his rival Fong. The fortune teller (who speaks Thai
through an interpreter) insults Yam and beats him with a stick. Suddenly,
Yam's bodyguard Jack shoots the paraphernalia of the fortune teller and then
points the gun at the fortune teller and asks him to
foresee his own future: will he (Jack) shoot him or not? The fortune teller says "No" and Jack shoots him in the foot.
He then tells his boss Yam to ignore fortune tellers and to trust instead the devotion of his men.
Driving back home in the middle of the night, the gang is ambushed and Yam is almost killed.
The rival gang's top killer, Martin, briefly aims his gun at Jack but then
doesn't kill him (Jack calmly smokes a cigarette even knowing that Martin is
aiming at him).
In revenge for Yam's murder, Jack and other members of Yam's gang tear up
Martin's place.
Jack and Martin then exchange insults and threats via various intermediaries.
They find each other and collide with their cars until the cars stop working.
Then they calmly walk out of the their cars and enter the bar of their friend Po.
There they play a silly game of breaking wine glasses to prove who is smarter.
The silly confrontation ends when Martin's girlfriend Fiona and Jack's girlfriend Yoyo arrive in other cars. The men take off and the girls have to walk home.
Fiona, who has been with Martin longer than Yoyo has been with Jack, explains
that they look like friends but are doomed to kill each other, and that these
men respect other men better than they respect their women.
Jack is informed that Yam is flying to Bangkok to see the fortune teller again
and decides that it is a dangerous idea, so Jack takes a plane too.
"the general" in Bangkok
Meanwhile, Martin informs Fong, who hides in a secluded mansion, that he failed to kill Yam. We learn that Fong and Yam were supposed to join forces but Yam betrayed Fong and now Fong wants him dead. Fong asks Martin to kill Yam before Yam reaches "the general". Martin flies to Bangkok too.
Martin visits the fortune teller, who has one foot in a cast. He mocks the fortune teller and asks him to predict his own future: will he (Martin) shoot him?
The fortune teller answers "Yes" and Martin shoots him and then congratulates him for correctly predicting his own future.
Yam's men stop at a hotel. Martin's men attack it.
In the massive shootout a lot of people die and finally Martin and Jack confront
each other until they run out of bullets. They collapse to the floor, wounded.
Yam proves to be a coward but shoots Martin repeatedly on the legs.
Then, not realizing it's Jack, he beats Jack on the head until he falls unconscious.
They are hospitalized.
Fong and Yam, the leaders of the two gangs, travel to a jungle location to
meet up with the general, who is a real army general, but a foreign one (he
speaks to them in English).
The general brokers the peace between the two gangs.
Fong and Yam shake hands.
Meanwhile, the two girlfriends prove their devotion to the two crippled
gangsters. Yoyo saves
Jack from two killers hiding him in the morgue but
accidentally starts a fire.
Fiona authorizes the doctor to amputate Martin's legs and then steals expensive medicines from a pharmacy while washing his poop from his pants at the hospital.
She tries in vain to get help from Fong.
She prostitutes herself with the head of a shipping company to get
herself and Martin smuggled back into Hong Kong.
When they arrive, Fiona pushes Martin's wheelchair into Fong's nightclub,
determined to get some help for Martin.
She then has to drag the wheelchair up the stairs to reach the room where
Fong is partying, but in vain: he orders his men to dump her and Martin
outside in the rain. They even destroy the wheelchair so she has to push
Martin away on a dolly. Undeterred, she walks back into the nightclub
shouting to Fong's men that Fong is a coward and a traitor.
Fiona ruins Fong's party and Fong shoots her dead in front of everybody.
Martin becomes a beggar, panhandling around the city on his dolly,
but slowly recovers
his strength through incessant exercise and arms himself with a gun.
Martin tries to assassinate Fong but misses him and Fong's men almost kill him.
Elsewhere, Jack in still in Thailand, works a regular humble job and lives in a crowded tenement
with Yoyo, whose face has been horribly scarred by the fire.
One day Jack sees a picture of Martin in the paper and finds a way to communicate with him via faxes sent to Po's bar, that Po then hangs on the window for Martin to read.
When Fong finds one such fax, he sent goons to assassinate Jack. They are easily killed by Jack and Jack decides to return to Hong Kong. He faxes the date to
Po, who hangs it at the window for Martin.
Jack arrives at Po's bar and calls one of his old buddies to warn him to stay out of the fight. Fong hears that some of his men and Yam's men refuse to fight Jack and Martin.
Jack and Martin reunite and Jack pushes Martin's wheelchair towards Fong's
nightclub.
Jack and Martin kill everybody (of course) and finally kill both Fong and Yam,
but Martin is killed and Jack fatally wounded.
As Fong is agonizing on the floor, Jack puts a gun in Martin's hand and pulls the trigger.
Then Jack falls to the floor, dead like everybody else.
Anhua/ Dark Flower/ The Longest Nite (1998) was written by Ka-Fai Wai and partially directed by Patrick Yau. It is perhaps his bleakest film.
Fai Seung Dat Yin/ Expect The Unexpected (1998), co-directed with Patrick Yau, pokes fun at both the gangsters and the police.
The protagonist of the police thrillers An Zhan/ Hidden War/ Running Out of Time (1999) and Running Out of Time 2 (2001) is a gangster who is dying of cancer.
Running Out of Time is a clever heist movie,
a stunningly elaborate thriller, scripted again by Nai-Hoi Yau,
elevated way above the average of that genre by neurotic camera work.
There are two protagonists, and as usual it's a battle between evil and good.
But here "good" ends up siding with "evil", and "evil" ends up doing good.
These two smart and honest (in their own ways) protagonists represent completely different life trajectories, but both positive in a sea of negative characters:
they are surrounded by a society that is either selfish (the young woman who is fascinated by the criminal and indifferent to which crime he may have committed), greedy (the dishonest manager who hides money in the bathroom) or stupid (the police chief who is easily fooled, the naive US gangsters who are easily robbed and killed by the much smarter Chinese gangsters).
A young man, Cheung Wah, walks up to the roof of a high-rise building and walks straight to the edge. A flashback shows the doctor telling him that he only has four weeks to live.
An officer in suit and tie, Ho Sheung-sang, is called on the scene of a hostage
situation: gangsters robbed a bank and now hold hostages and
demand a car and a helicopter to escape. There are already wounded hostages.
Ho boldly walks into the bank and stirs up disagreement between the two gangsters over what to do next. One is ready to kill the hostages.
As the situation is about to get out of control, one of the hostages pulls out a gun and shoots the two gangsters dead. The hostages run out of the building
and Ho remains alone with the shooter and the dying gangsters.
The shooter identifies himself as a cop on vacation. Ho sees that one of the gangsters is still alive. Before dying the gangster whispers to him that the shooter is their mastermind, but then dies: Ho has no proof that the cop is actually a criminal, not a hero. Ho walks out of the building unharmed and the corrupt cop kills himself.
Ho then notices an old photographer taking a lot of pictures of him.
The following day Chueng does some research on Ho on his computer.
Then Chueng eats at the same diner and pays the bill for Ho, without talking to him but leaving him a cryptic written message: "13".
Chueng then calmly walks into a bank and stages his own robbery, but
takes only one hostage: the manager. He forces the manager to open the safe
and then stuffs the manager's jacket with banknotes.
Chueng climbs into the air-conditioning ducts and installs a security camera
in another office. Then he returns to the manager's office.
Chueng refuses the first negotiator sent by the police.
When Ho shows up, Chueng, holding the hostage on the roof of the building, tells him cryptically that he wants to play a game with him for three days.
Ho tries to negotiate when Chueng suddenly shoots the hostage.
The cops are about to storm the roof but Chueng shows them a remote controller
that he claims controls a bomb. Ho doesn't believe that the bomb is real but
the police chief orders his men to stop. Chueng jumps into a shaft of the air-conditioning system and disappears. Ho proves to the chief that the bomb is a fake.
The hostage is not dead after all: Chueng's gun was full of red paint, not bullets.
Chueng enters a restroom where he hid a cop uniform, wears the uniform and then calmly walks out of the building. Ho guesses right each of Chueng's moves but
he's always a few seconds too late to catch him.
He then has an idea: Chueng will need a taxi to go home, so Ho takes control
of a taxi and wears the driver's uniform. Sure enough Cheung takes his taxi
and Ho informs him that they are going to the police station.
Cheung starts shooting randomly at passers-by, missing them narrowly.
Ho stops the car and Cheung runs away.
He boards a bus and sits next to a girl behaving like he's her boyfriend.
The girl sees that he has a gun and cooperates.
Meanwhile, the manager is in a bathroom, torn between returning the money
that Chueng stuffed in his pockets and keeping it. Eventually he hides it
in the tank of the toilet.
Chueng gets off the bus and the girl follows him to return his sunglasses
(she seems neither scared of him nor interested in alerting the police).
Ho and the police chief are left clueless. Ho understands that this is not
a normal robbery but can't figure out what this is all about.
In another part of town, a meeting of gangsters takes place:
a bald man, "Baldy", and two young US gangsters are meeting with the old photographer shown in an early scene.
Baldy asks the old man, who speaks into a device, to check if a giant diamond
is real. The old man says it is. Baldy instead tells the US gangsters that it is not and shoots them dead, and keeps the diamond. The old man, not shocked at all, tells Baldy that he has a customer for the diamond and he wants a 20% commission. Basically, the US gangsters were naive to think that Baldy would pay for something that he could have for free, and the old man knew it.
Baldy and his men then walk into the office of a fictitious financial company,
which happens to be right next to the bank "robbed" by Chueng.
Baldy and his men walk past Ho who is walking out of the bank after interrogating the manager (a manager who is only interested in going to the bathroom where
he hid the money).
Ho's interest in that company is merely that they may have seen something unusual.
Cheung, meanwhile, can see what is going on inside that office because he left his security camera pointed precisely at the safe of that office.
Cheung watches carefully as one of Baldy's goons opens the safe and notes
the combination. Cheung puts an ordinary screw into a jeweler's box and smiles.
But he is soon shaken by violent coughing and spits blood: his conditions
are worsening.
Ho is puzzled that Cheung broke into that bank instead of robbing easier
offices in the same building, and is puzzled that Cheung chose him for his game.
He senses that Cheung wants to use him for something.
He receives a package that contains the jeweler's box with the screw.
Ho continues his investigation even if the police chief told him to stop.
First he meets with a female investigator of the Interpol and finds pictures of Baldy in her
files. He asks about Baldy and the female investigator tells him that
he is a wanted man who used to work for the old man, the one who
took pictures of Ho and who appraised the diamond. The old man's name is
Peter Cheung.
At night Ho fools the security guard and enters the building.
Cheung is parked outside and watches Ho who is being filmed by Cheung's
security camera.
This time Ho is interested in Baldy's office.
Ho doesn't know the code to enter Baldy's office but uses white powder to figure
out which digits are more used and then tries all their combination until one
works.
As he explores the office, Ho realizes that the screw belongs to a panel of
the ventilation ducts. Following that clue, he crawls into the ducts and
finds Cheung's security camera. As Ho looks into it, Cheung presses a button
and causes an explosion in the duct which alerts Baldy's goons to the
intruder's presence. Ho has to run for his life.
Baldy's goons also realize that the camera was positioned to show the combination of the safe.
Cheung calls Ho on his mobile phone and toys with him.
Cheung drives into the underground parking lot of the building, driving a car
identical to Baldy's car and wearing a wig to look bald like Baldy.
One of Baldy's goons comes downstairs to hand the briefcase with the diamond to Baldy and hands it to Cheung: Cheung has used Ho to steal a diamond.
Baldy arrives seconds later and finds his goon lying unconscious on the floor.
At the same time Ho gets into his car and sees Cheung drive away.
Ho chases Cheung through the deserted streets, unaware that Baldy is also
chasing him. Eventually they are both trapped by Baldy's men who shoot at
them. Ho and Cheung strike a temporary alliance to get out alive.
Cheung and Ho drive away safely and this time Ho has the gun and tells Cheung
to drive to the nearest police station, but Cheung instead crashes the car into
a wall at high speed.
They both crawl out of the smoking wreckage. Cheung is able to grab the
briefcase with the diamond and walk away, but, wrestling with Ho, he drops the bottle with the painkilling pills that he has been taking.
After he is dismissed from the hospital, Ho is approached by the
police chief, who always hated him but has found the pills by the car and
comically now thinks that Ho is the one who is terminally ill and feels bad
about mistreating him.
Ho continues his investigation after his
Interpol friend delivers a file on Peter Cheung: he died a year earlier and his son disappeared.
Meanwhile, Baldy receives a package from Peter Cheung: inside there are photos
of the diamond. Peter wants a lot of money to return the diamond.
Baldy calls him to threaten him and we see who picks up the phone: it's Cheung,
Peter's son, who speaks with the device, and we realize that the old man has always been the young Cheung camouflaged as his old father.
Cheung has architected this complex plan to take revenge on Baldy, who betrayed
his father. Cheung asks Ho to meet him at a diner and tells him when and where he is going to deliver the diamond to Baldy, so Ho can arrest him.
That will conclude their three-day game.
Cheung takes a bus and, again, the bus is stopped by the police, and,
again, the same girl is on the bus. The girl grabs him and pretends to be
his girlfriend. It is actually a routine police check on the driver.
The girl and Cheung enter a restaurant. She tells him that she has seen his
face in the newspaper and knows who he is. Their conversation is interrupted
when she sees him coughing blood and he quickly leaves.
Baldy and his men stake the bowling place where they are supposed to meet Cheung.
The police chief and his men are there, disguised as customers, ready to arrest
Baldy the moment he takes possession of the diamond.
And Ho too is there.
A woman sits next to him: it's Cheung, dressed like a woman.
Cheung asks Ho to deliver the briefcase with the diamond to Baldy.
Baldy, thinking that the disguised Cheung is Ho's girlfriend, tells Ho that he will give the money to the girl while Ho remains as a hostage.
Two of Baldy's goons walk Cheung to the locker and show her the bag full of money.
Ho keeps waiting in the bowling hall. Nothing happens. After waiting a long time, Baldy dispatches another man to check what is going on: Cheung has knocked out the two goons and disappeared. He is actually in the bathroom coughing blood
but also changing to normal clothes.
When he recovers, Cheung returns with a bag that, he claims, contains the real
diamond, whereas, he claims, Ho's briefcase contains a fake.
Baldy takes Cheung's bag, but only finds a bowling ball inside.
Baldy throws it angrily on the floor: the ball breaks and reveals a whole bunch
of small diamonds inside. These are small diamonds that Cheung found in the safe when he staged the fake heist.
Now the police can get into action: they arrest Baldy for stealing the diamonds.
In the commotion Ho doesn't notice that Cheung has disappeared with the giant diamond: he has both the bag with the money and the briefcase with the diamond.
Ho finds Cheung and arrests him. Cheung challenges him again to take him to the police station. This time Ho handcuffs him to the car. While Ho is driving, Cheung spits blood on the windshield.
Then he unveils a remote-controlled bomb. To check whether Cheung is bluffing,
Ho presses the button. Alas, this time it's a real bomb: in one minute it will
explode. Cheung tells Ho that he doesn't care since he is dying anyway and his
last wish is not to die in a police station.
Ho stops the car and walks away from it, apparently to let Cheung die the
way he wants. But the car never explodes. Instead, Cheung drives away with
a smile on his face: he has won the three-day game. But Ho is not surprised
and doesn't even turn to see the car drive away: maybe he knew it was a bluff
and decided to help Cheung get away. It is the 13th day of the month, and the
anniversary of the death of Cheung's father.
Days later Ho reads in the newspaper that a generous benefactor donated
all the money to a cancer foundation. Later Ho takes the bus and sees Cheung's
girl... wearing the giant diamond. She thinks that it is a cheap jewel
and tells Ho that it was a gift and that the guy disappeared after giving her that gift.
We know what happened to him: the first scene showed us how Cheung ended his life.
Joi Gin a Long/ Where a Good Man Goes (1999), co-directed with Patrick Yau, is yet another triad
melodrama
set in Macau in which a gangster just released from jail wants to find
the wife who betrayed him and stole the loot but instead falls in love
with a lonely woman.
Cheung Foh/ The Mission (1999), one of his most stylish gangster movies, is basically one long shootout with very little dialogue.
Someone is trying to assassinate the boss of a gang, Lung, who lives in
a huge mansion.
His brother Frank organizes a retinue of five body guards, including
the owner of a night club, Roy, and his man Shin (who normally finds
girls and rooms for VIPs), under the direction of the ruthless Curtis.
They torture in vain one of the men who is
suspected of being a traitor. One night someone shoots Lung in an alley,
fooling the body guards around him. Lung is saved by the bullet-proof vest,
but the sniper gets away. Roy is furious. Lung, instead, takes it
philosophically and doesn't blame anyone.
Someone tries to kill all of the bodyguards in a deserted shopping mall,
but they escape unarmed after the shootout.
Another attempt is foiled at the office building where the boss works.
The man they tortured is now a janitor. The boss hands him some money
on the way to the elevator. The janitor realizes that the men coming out
of the elevator are about to shoot him and screams. The janitor is shot
but the boss and his bodyguards can escape unarmed again.
They chase one of the shooters and lay siege to an abandoned warehouse.
After a long shootout, Lung's men prevailed over the men inside and capture
one of them. They finally find out who is trying to assassinate their boss
Lung: a family friend named Fat Cheung who worked with Lung's and Frank's
father in the old days but was marginalized and now simply runs a restaurant.
He is liquidated quickly and the five bodyguards drink to their eternal
friendship. However, when Curtis meets Frank to receive the financial reward,
Frank tells him that Shin has been having an affair with Lung's wife.
Curtis coldly decides to kill him, but Roy, learning of the problem, tells
Curtis that Shin, who has been his right arm man for a long time,
is under his protection. The team is now split.
Roy finds Shin, gives him his share of the reward and beats him up.
But Roy and the other two have decided to save his life. The problem is that,
by doing so, they risk their own life. They meet with Curtis at a restaurant
for a last dinner. Curtis confirms that he intends to kill Shin, who is sitting
next to him. Curtis' man James offers to talk to Lung and try to reverse
his order while the others continue their dinner. On his way to Lung's place
James witnesses two of Lung's men assassinate Lung's wife.
James runs back to the restaurant but time is up. Despite hearing that the
woman is dead, Curtis carries out his orders and kills Shin in front of the
others. Everybody points the gun at everybody else.
Roy shoots furious but not at Curtis, simply out of anger.
He has no choice but to let Curtis do his job.
They all leave but on the way out Curtis hands his man James a blank bullet:
he shot Shin knowing that James had loaded his gun with a blank.
When they are all gone, Shin walks out of the restaurant, drunk, but alive.
He also co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai (and produced) the films
Help (2000),
Needing You (2000), a very successful romantic comedy that pairs a hard-working girl
cheated by her boyfriend with her womanizing boss,
Love on a Diet (2001),
Wu Yen (2001).
The big-budget film
Chuen Jik Sat Sau/ Fulltime Killer (2001), an adaptation of
Pang Ho-cheung's 1997 novel,
was also a collaboration with Wai Ka-Fai.
Unfortunately the last 30 minutes lose not only credibility but also all the suspense and mystery of the first hour.
The film is partially redeemed by the ambiguous ending, and certainly boasts
many memorable images.
The film opens in a cemetery where a young Japanese man is paying his respects
to a Rebecca Tse and meditating on murder.
He introduces himself as O, a full-time killer.
We then see him in a Malaysian train station where a fellow Japanese man calls him Ito and recognizes him as an old classmate. The old classmate tries in vain
to strike a conversation and tells him that he has four children and has
a fifth one on the way. O ignores him, pulls out a gun, kills a few passengers
coming out of the train and then coldly kills the Japanese who recognized him,
the father of four children.
The action then moves to Thailand, where a Chinese motorcyclist delivers some flowers to
a police station.
He has a powerful gun hidden among the flowers and goes on a rampage.
He works his way to the jail where a man is being kept.
He throws a bunch of grenades in his cell and then walks away smiling:
the convict tries desperately to get rid of the grenades but it's an impossible
task and soon the police station explodes.
He introduces himself as Tok, a hitman as well.
The action moves to Singapore, where Tok demonstrates how ferocious he is to
a local gangster.
O is in Korea and tells a friend that the man in the train station was his best friend in school.
In Hong Kong a Taiwanese woman named Chin works in a Japanese video store.
She also works as a housecleaner for O.
While O is not home and she is changing clothes, she doesn't know that O is watching her with a telescope from across the street.
He sees that, when he is not home, she plays like a child with the objects she
finds, including his guns.
Meanwhile, O receives a threatening email from a stranger, and we see that it
was Tok who sent it.
A customer shows up at Chin's video shop wearing a different mask every day, masks of famous people, and says that he only
rent videos of movies that he's already seen.
He doesn't reveal his face but invites her to go to the
movies with him, and tells her, halfjokingly, that he is a professional killer.
Meanwhile, the Hong Kong police are investigating the murder of the old schoolmate. and interviewing the widow in her house.
During the date with Chin, the masked man removes his mask, and we see it's Tok, and then romantically grabs her hand.
They get a drink at a cafe and he tells her that he is wants to kill a Japanese man, and shows her the murder weapon: a syringe full of poison.
She thinks he is joking.
Tok wears his Bill Clinton mask, walks outside, pulls out a gun, and kills a few people who are coming out of a car escorting a Japanese man, and then kills the Japanese man himself with the poison.
Throughout the scene, O has been watching and taking pictures with the zoom of a camera. Tok pulls out his mask revealing his face to O, as if knowing that O is watching and taking pictures. Then Tok returns to the cafe to finish his conversation with Chin, coolly telling her that he just killed five people.
She laughs thinking it's a joke but police cars and ambulances dride by.
O develops the pictures and think that he has seen Tok before but can't remember where.
O asks his boss, someone who knows everybody and learns that the name is Tok.
His boss knows that Tok is challenging O, considered the top assassin of Asia.
Meanwhile, Tok has taken Chin to an abandoned building and is showing her how a gun works. He tells her to aim at a homeless man who is picking up garbage in
the street, tells her that the gun is not loaded and then tells her to pull the trigger: the gun is loaded, but luckily she misses. She is briefly furious at Tok for playing such a cruel and dangerous prank on her.
Then they talk about her employer O. She says that he
doesn't seem to really live in the apartment, and every time he comes back from a trip there is a new little Snoopy statue and she reads of a new killing in the place visited by O.
She tells Tok that O's previous cleaning lady, her good friend Nancy, disappeared mysteriously and we
see a brief flashback in which she is dead next to O and another flashback
in which O buries her body. But then we also see a longer flashback in which O is spying on the previous cleaning lady, gangsters break into the apartment and threaten her, she is defiant and they kill her.
Chin decides to quit her cleaning job and tells O she'll work only two more weeks.
Tok explains to Chin how he receives contracts from his boss: ads in the newspapers: his next assignment is in a subway station of Singapore.
Meanwhile, O has also sent a picture of Tok to the police station.
Both O and the investigators realize that Tok used to be a famous Olympic athlete who collapsed at the most important moment of his career; and Tok is the brother of another famous Olympic shooter, who has disappeared after failing in exactly the same way a few years earlier.
In Singapore two sexy women try to kill Tok, but he has already figured out that it is a setup by a boss who wants to eliminate him. Dozens of police cars are converging on the subway station, summoned by the boss but Tok escapes.
Tok confronts the boss who betrayed him, kills his goons and then tortures the boss himself.
O's next assignment is in Macau, but Tok is there too. O kills an Indian man as ordered but is then shot at by Tok, and realizes that his boss has betrayed him.
O realizes that this boss will look for him at his apartment, and that night Chin is supposed to clean the apartment. O rushes back home just in time to
stop the goons from kidnapping Chin.
O now tells her the truth: that he is a professional killer and that he lives in an apartment across the street.
O instructs Chin to hide in that apartment and she sees his real environment:
a place full of high-quality guns and... a telescope to spy on the other apartment, the one that Chin cleans. She looks into the telescope and sees a Bill Clinton mask (O was wearing the same mask as Tok?).
O confronts his boss, and he confesses to be Tok's brother: that's how
Tok knew all of O's moves.
The police follow clues to O's apartment. O comes back in time to rescue Chin,
who volunteers to grab a gun and help him. O and Chin engange in a shootout with the police, but are eventually captured. Just then Tok starts shooting at the
police from a high-rise building, so O and Chin can escape.
Tok breaks into the office of the police inspector, Albert, and demands the Snoopys taken from O's apartment. Then he mysteriously escapes the police station.
The police inspector, Albert, is so obsessed with the story of Tok and O that he becomes a drunkard and even thinks of killing himself.
He has decided to write a book about Tok and O and is desperate to finish the story.
Then out of the blue Chin contacts him and tells him what happened after O and she escaped.
O's previous cleaning lady was her best friend Nancy.
Chin figured out that O was an assassin and suspected that he killed Nancy,
and, while working for him, she kept track of all the murders committed in
all the places that O visited. But O told her that he didn't kill Nancy, he
just couldn't save her, and buried her in the tomb of someone else (the Rebecca Tse of the beginning). And then O asked her to live with him, but first he
had to confront Tok, whose ultimate ambition was to kill him.
O and Chin met Tok at a cafe. Tok gave Chin the box of Snoopys.
Then the two men left Chin and drove out of town where they had their private duel and Tok killed O. This ends Chin's tale to the inspector.
But then the inspector sees Chin drives away in a car driven by... O!
And we see the real ending: Tok collapsed just like he had collapsed in the
Olympic final and O killed him.
The inspector watches them drive away. We see O visiting a tomb and the camera
shows up who's inside: Tok.
The inspector decides to stick to Chin's story for the ending of his book:
Tok killed O.
To then co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai (and produced)
My Left Eye Sees Ghosts (2002) and
Lik goo lik goo san nin choi/ Fat Choi Spirit (2002), one of his best comedies.
PTU (2003) is aesthetically one of his best, the culmination of his
cinematographer's noir calligraphy, but the plot is razor thin and not
particularly well developed. Towards the end the photography steals the show
with dazzling movements and angles, while the story tries to converge into
an epic shootout whose rationale is not completely clear (its best and funniest
thing being a child who apparently rides around at night breaking into cars to steal coins
and who gets caught up in the mayhem).
The whole action takes place during one night.
Police officers on an armored truck comment on the death of a fellow cop,
killed by bank robbers. Ponytail and four of his thugs meet at a restaurant.
The owner is terrorized by them. A long-haired kid is forced to move to another
table when they take over his table. The kid silently moves and keeps eating.
Meanwhile, Lo, the sergeant who controls the neighborhood shows up at the same
restaurant. Outside he is confronted by a young man who obviously does not know
who he is. The young man is the grandson of the butcher, and the butcher
immediately comes to apologize to sergeant Lo. The sergeant walks into
the restaurant and orders (the owner of the restaurant is no less terrorized
by him than by the thugs). He sits at the same table as the thugs, who then
move to the table of the long-haired kid, who then moves to another table.
Ponytail's thugs leave the restaurant. When the sergeant leaves too (without
having exchanged a single word with Ponytail), he finds that one of them is
scratching his car's door. The sergeant starts running after the punk.
The butcher's grandson seizes the opportunity and dumps white paint on the
sergeant's expensive car. Inside the restaurant the long-haired kid receives
a phone call, then gets up, pulls out a steak knife and pushes the knife into
the back of Ponytail. Ponytail does not die: he musters enough strength to
run outside, flag down a taxi, then, when the taxi driver runs away scared,
drive the taxi himself towards the hospital. He finally dies crashing into
other cars. The sergeant is still chasing the punk through dark deserted
alleys. It is a trap: the others are waiting for him behind a corner.
Ironically, he trips and falls badly by himself. The thugs find him lying
unconscious on the pavement. They still beat him up, fearful of what to tell
Ponytail. When the police officers find the sergeant, he claims he simply
fell by himself. However, his gun is gone, and that's serious enough that
they should report it immediately. He begs them not to, because it would
jeopardize his coming promotion. The captain in charge, Mike Ho, accepts to do it
and tells his men that he himself will report it if the gun is not recovered
within a day.
The sergeant, nicknamed Fatty, takes off on his car and,
first thing, he buys a toy gun and paints it so it will look real.
He reaches the site where
Ponytail lies dead and steals his cell phone. Ho is calling it from the cell
phone of Ponytail's cousin. Fatty tells Ho that Ponytail is dead.
The icy female inspector Cheng can smell that something is wrong when Ponytail's
phone goes missing, even if Fatty quickly returns it.
Ho's men corner another punk and almost beat him to death until he reveals
where Ponytail's man hang out: the third floor of an abandoned building.
It is now middle of the night and nobody is in the streets except for the cops.
After Cheng sends
a trusted cop to "learn" from Ho, Ho's men become reluctant to follow him:
by not reporting the lost gun they are breaking the law and now there is
a spy among them to witness their actions.
Nonetheless Ho is adamant that he will continue to search for Lo's gun
until the morning, even risking his career. His men follow him.
Lo/Fatty is approached by an old fat man, nicknamed Uncle, who tells him
that Eye Ball is innocent of Ponytail's murder. Icy inspector Cheng is in
fact looking for Eye Ball (using interrogation methods no less brutal
than Ho's).
Ho and his men enter the abandoned warehouse (a lengthy pointless scene).
iThey find two half-naked girls kept captive by a woman. Ho simply asks
for the gang's whereabouts and ignores the crying girls.
Cheng has Ponytail's phone and she realizes that someone keeps calling that
number looking for Lo/Fatty: that someone is Ho. Viceversa Lo/Fatty
keeps getting phone calls for Ponytail.
Deserted streets. Cops walking and/or driving around.
Fatty meets Ponytail's father, who is very angry at the thugs who were
supposed to protect his son (the ones whom Ho is looking for):
he has trapped them naked into tiny cages. Ponytail's father Bald Head believes that
Eye Ball killed his son, so he wants Eye Ball's head in exchange for
Fatty's gun. Fatty leaves and the old man resumes
torturing the men who were supposed to protect his son.
Cheng's men figure out what is wrong with Ponytail's cell phone: it is
actually Fatty's phone! Which also explains why Fatty keeps getting phone
calls for Ponytail: he accidentally switched the two phones.
Fatty calls Eye Ball and tells him that everything will be all right.
Then he meets with Ho at the restaurant and asks him to keep the cops out
of Canton St at 4am. Cheng has seen his car downstairs (being painted white
it is easy to recognize) and walks to their table explaining the mixup with
the cell phones. Fatty grabs his cell phone and runs out the back door.
He then calls Bald Head from a public phone and asks him to take him to
Eye Ball at 4am. The next person to use the same public phone is a young
man who seems desperate to get in touch with someone.
Cheng's undercover agent calls her saying that he has
important information about Eye Ball and Bald Head.
When Bald Head leaves for the appointment, he is followed by Cheng's car.
Fatty and the young man are still near the same phone booth. This time
the young man gets through and a man tells him that they are about to
pick him up. Fatty is waiting for Bald Head. A child, who has been riding
around on his bicycle, breaks the windows
of a car to steal coins. Some of Ho's cops, who were investigating the
mysterious break-ins, are watching but don't intervene.
Eye Ball arrives... and he realizes that Fatty has set him up because a few
seconds later Ponytail's father Bald Head arrives too.
Cheng drives by in front of Fatty, who is still at the telephone booth.
Ho's men, disobeying Fatty, come running down the street.
A taxi stops by to drop off three friends of the young man
who was using the same phone booth... but they quickly pull out guns (are they
the bank robbers mentioned in the first sequence of the film?)
Shooting erupts: Bald Head
wants to kill Eye Ball (and they kill each other right away), everybody else
shoots for non-obvious reasons (and without trying to avoid bullets).
Fatty is the only one who doesn't have a real gun and crawls away, chased by
the young man of the phone booth. Fatty trips on something and, lo and behold,
finds his own lost phone; and shoots the young man just in time.
Lots of dead people in the street. Cheng behaved like a coward, hiding
inside her car, and apologizes to Fatty: she fires a few shots so it will
look like she participated in the shootout.
The child rides away with the coins he stole from the cars he broke into.
New collaborations with Wai were
Love for All Seasons (2003),
Xiang Zuo Zou Xiang You Zou/ Turn Left Turn Right (2003), the adaptation of Jimmy Liao's graphic novel A Chance of Sunshine (1999), and
Running On Karma (2003).
The latter is not a great film because the plot is implausible, the acting is approximate, and there are amateurish scenes, but it is an
intriguing philosophical meditation on justice, revenge and the meaning of life.
The film opens with a supersized male stripper dancing on a stage nd sending his female fans delirious.
A cop is called for a murder: a man whose face has been horribly
disfigured. Inside a box they find a bearded Indian
contortionist. One of the women who was crazier
about the male stripper pulls out her badge: she is a cop and he is under
arrest. The contortionist is arrested and chained in the car. One of the cops
starts beating him up. Meanwhile, the male stripper runs away naked.
The contortionist manages to kill the cop who is beating him and to escape and, chased by three armed cops and a dog, runs into the same alley where
the naked stripper is running from the other direction, chased by the female
cop. The two men briefly collide and the stripper has visions of extreme
violence and, lying on the ground, mumbles that he used to be a monk.
The contortionist disappears while the stripper is arrested and taken into
custody. The captain tortures the naked man but the female cop comes to rescue
him: he is only guilty of indecent exposure. She bandages him and then
interrogates him about his past: he used to be a martial monk in a temple.
She has him deported back to China. He has visions of violence.
Her boss tells her that she is being
drafted by the captain for the investigation of the contortionist.
Alone in the apartment where the murder was committed she meets the male
stripper again, who came back to warn her of impending violence that only
she can avert. The stripper can see what happened: the contortionist attacked
the victim, they fought, the victim begged in vain, the contortionist kept
beating his face, clearly full of hatred. He takes her to the morgue with
an impossible jump from the roof of a building into a window of the morgue.
By simply staring at the cadaver, the male stripper can see a scene in which
the victim stabs a man in the back. He interprets the vision for her: there's
a woman who is the clue to finding the Indian.
In fact, the Indian man has reached the apartment of a woman, exhausted
and bleeding.
The female cop, Fung-yee, has to join the captain who has found his own clue.
The male stripper comically tries to follow the police cars riding a motorcycle.
The cops find the same woman and the captain guesses that the Indian is hiding
inside a shopping bag. The captain beats the shopping bag until blood starts
leaking out but then makes the mistake of staring inside: the Indian grabs his
head and bites his cheek. The Indian's woman tells Fung-yee that she has known
the Indian only for one day but felt like she had to help him. The Indian
captures Fung-yee and is about to kill her but she is saved by the male stripper
who also kills the Indian. The male stripper, who is known only as Big,
is sent back to jail because he is an illegal immigrant and is deported again.
Fung-yee travels to the temple of martial monks and learns that Big was
devastated when a girl was murdered. He gave up being a monk and started
having visions of other people's karma.
Big returns illegally to Hong Kong and saves Fung-yee again, this time while
she is falling from a skyscraper, and helps her arrest the acrobatic thief
she was chasing. He then tells her that in the previous life she was a Japanese
soldier who committed atrocities (his recurring vision whenever he stares at
her) and that in this life she has to pay for those sins.
He already saved her twice but won't be able to save her always.
He decides to enter a bodybuilding contest and is shocked to see a completely
transformed Fung-yee, dressed like a silly girl and hanging out with punks:
she tells him she quit her job and wants to enjoy life. He is reassured when
she confesses that it is a lie: the punks are cops, trying to catch some drug
dealers. Fung-yee is now convinced of Big's visions: she is going to die young
as punishment for her sins in her previous life. She then decides to die for
something useful: armed with a camcorder, she ventures into the mountain near the temple to catch the bandit who killed Big's friend. After one week the police
find her camcorder that has recorded what appears to be her last moments:
she found the bandit but he surprised her and beheaded her. Big searches the
mountain until he finds the place where her torso is buried, and then he finds
the head hanging from a tree.
Then again, like years earlier, full of rage, he chases the bandit who is
hiding in the mountain.
When he finds him, though, he realizes that the beast in front of him is...
himself. The beastly man of the cave is him as he quit being a monk and
roamed the mountains: he did find the killer and killed him. But he (the beastly
Big) also saw karma: the friend that was killed by the bandit deserved to die, just like Fung-yee deserved to die for her sins in her previous life.
the scene takes place in a cave surrounded by giant Buddha statues.
Big's hatred prompts him to attack his beastly doppelganger. Big prevails
and is ready to behead the beast but then he stops in front of a giant Buddha.
We see Fung-yee's last moments: how she met the beastly Big, thinking he was
the bandit, and how she was beheaded by the beastly Big.
Big starts walking alone on the mountain. Ten years later he has become his
beastly self, and he does meet the killer. But this time he hugs him instead
of taking revenge. They walk back to the village and he becomes a monk again.
Yesterday Once More (2004) is a caper movie.
The psychological noir and martial-arts film Throw Down (2004) is a minor
tribute to Kurosawa.
Breaking News (2004) is another triad film but in reality it's a
satire of the media-obsessed bureaucracy.
The shootouts and the chases are certainly above average.
Undercover police officers have surrounded a building, trying to arrest a
group of five gangsters. Two traffic cops screw up the setup and a shootout
ensues. Despite the amount of bullets, the five gangsters manage to escape
in a police van, and only one is wounded.
The cops catch up with the van in a place where a cameraman are filming a
traffic accident.
The shootout resumes, with the cameraman and photographers filming everything,
and the gangsters escape again.
The TV channel shows the images of a cop begging for his life.
The police chief summons his top agents. Rebecca remarks that in the age of media it's all about the show, and so far the gangsters have had the upper end.
Rebecca is the daughter of a friend and former partner of the police chief.
The inspector who caused the shootout, Cheung, wants revenge and is determined
to find the gangsters.
Rebecca doesn't like Cheung and wants him off the case, but Cheung continues
his investigation, dragging his team with him, without any authorization.
We see that the gangsters are hiding in an apartment and their leader,
Yuen, is already plotting another heist.
Cheung finds out where they hide and prepares to attack the building,
but Rebecca is preparing a major show of force for the media
involving dozens of cops equipped with head-mounted cameras.
Rebecca's media-friendly army arrives after a shootout has already erupted
between Cheung's team and the gangsters.
Rebecca directs the operation focusing on maximizing the show for the media.
Yuen again outsmarts Cheung's men
while the media converge on the building and film everything.
The gangsters split in two groups:
while the cops are searching the building Yuen and another gangster, Chung,
hide into the apartment of an ordinary (but a little dumb) man who tries
to protect his two children, while the other two gangsters run away.
Rebecca orders repeatedly Cheung to stop his adventure but Cheung ignores the order.
Two gangsters, Chun and his buddy Wong, who were hiding in the same building get into a separate shootout
with the cops and coincidentally break into the same apartment where Yuen and
Chung are hiding, the dumb man's apartment, thus attracting the cops there.
The cops are being embarrassed on every front but Rebecca's team edits the videos taken by the cameras before distributing them to the media.
Yuen sees the TV broadcast and asks the dumb man's son to upload pictures of
what really happened to the Internet so that the media can see them.
This creates another embarrassment for Rebecca.
Rebecca's team hacks the child's computer and talks directly to Yuen but Yuen
disconnects the computer.
Yuen and Chun calmly cook dinner together in the kitchen for everybody: dumb man, children, gangsters.
Yuen uploads the video of the dinner to the Internet: that's a great show for the media.
Rebecca responds serving lunch to all cops and reporters.
It has become a P.R. war between Rebecca and Yuen.
Cheung's team is told again to leave the building but Cheung again ignores the order.
The dumb man falls off the kitchen window and Yuen easily obtains that Rebecca
withdraws the police to avoid that the media broadcast live his death.
Then Yuen and Chun save the dumb man in front of the cameras.
The gangsters exit the apartment in two groups, each one hiding under a blanket with some hostages so that the police cannot shoot.
Cheung doesn't fall for it and realizes that one group is the gangsters, whereas the other one is a decoy.
While Cheung's team engages the gangsters, Rebecca's troops surround the other
group in front of the media only to discover that it's the dumb man with his children.. another embarrassment for the police.
Cheung chases Yuen and Chun in an elevator shaft, the last surviving gangsters,
but they blow up the shaft and escape to the street.
Rebecca tracks down Yuen thanks to a cell phone found on the body of one of his gangsters just when Cheung is also arriving.
Cheung gets hit by a car (after surviving an explosion!) but still continues
the chase. Rebecca is easily captured by Yuen in an alley.
Yuen takes her hostage on a minibus.
Yuen chases the minibus on a stolen motorcycle but soon crashes.
And soon several police cars show up: Rebecca reveals the camera that is
broadcasting everything live.
The minibus crashes too and Yuen comes out handcuffed to Rebecca.
But finally Cheung, still alive and relentless, shoots Yuen.
The wounded Yuen could still kill Rebecca. She refuses to raise her arm
because "the show must go on". Yuen decides to go down heroically and shoots in
the air, causing Cheung to finish him.
Both Rebecca and Cheung are displayed on television as heroes, thus salvaging
the honor of the police department.
Yesterday Once More (2004) is a romantic comedy about the partnership
of two skilled thieves.
The overrated Hak Sewui/ Election (2005)
amounts to little more than a diligent Chinese version of the Godfather.
There are lengthy detours that don't serve any purpose, such as
the night chase scene
and the ritual of brotherhood.
The gruesome ending feels like a desperate attempt at making the film a
little less predictable than it is.
There are two main criminal organizations in Hong Kong: the Sun Society, where power is
transferred dynastically from father to son, and the Triad, where the new
chairman is elected democratically every two years, a tradition that goes back centuries.
The elders of the Triad are discussing whom to elect next, and the choice is
between the ambitious Big D and the surgical and younger Lok.
The elders react negatively to Big D's attempt to buy the election and instead
elect Lok, who is congratulated by the main power broker, Uncle Teng.
Big D rebels: his men kidnap two of the "uncles", put them into cages
and roll the cages down a steep hill. He demands from outgoing chairman Whistle
the baton that symbolizes the leadership of the Triad, the baton that is
supposed to go to Lok. Whistle is scared of Big D, clearly a psychopath,
and keeps saying that the baton is past the border, in China, unreachable.
Meanwhile the police, sensing trouble, decides to arrest all the bosses,
starting with Uncle Teng, and then Lok. The police arrive just in time to
save Whistle from being killed by Big D. Even handcuffed, Big D still tries
to launch on Whistle, who, terrified, runs away and gets hit by a car.
While in prison each of the two bosses directs associates to hunt for the baton.
Both camps know that the baton is kept by Whistle's driver Four-Eye in China.
Big D's camp charges the young and icy Kun of killing Four-Eye.
The action moves to China.
Lok's camp finds where Four-Eye is being tortured, frees him and asks in vain
for the baton: Four-Eye is loyal only to Whistle and will release the baton
only if Whistle orders him, but Whistle is dying after the accident.
Lok's men, however, find the baton just when the police is storming the building.
One of them, Big Head, takes off with the baton while the other stays to
confront the police captain, an old friend who used to be a gangster himself.
Meanwhile, in the prison, Teng is summoned by the police chief, who tells him
flatly that he will not tolerate a civil war inside the Triad. Teng offers
to mediate between Big D and Lok in order to keep the peace that is
convenient for both the Triad and the police. Big D, however, refuses any
compromise and, instead, threatens to start his own society, something that
Teng would not tolerate. The police chief tells Teng that, in case of war,
he would arrest everybody. Teng calmly explains that the various societies
have 350,000 members: they wouldn't in all the prisons of the city.
Big Head is driving back to Hong Kong with the baton but is ambushed by Kun
and tries in vain to run away through a field of tall grass.
Kun proceeds to torture Big Head who refuses to surrender the baton.
Meanwhile the bosses of the Triad are agreeing to fight Big D, regardless of
previous allegiances, in the name of unity. Hence one calls Kun to tell him
that his new mission is to rescue the baton for Lok, and one calls
Big Head to tell him that Kun is his new boss. In a comic scene Kun stops
beating Big Head, and a bleeding Big Head gladly surrenders the baton to him.
In the middle of the night Kun, who is on his way to Hong Kong, realizes
that he is beeing followed by a car. Both Kun and the chaser cross the border
illegally, killing a border guard.
The bosses send a motorcycle to stop the chaser. Kun hands over the
baton to the motorcyclist. The motorcyclist is in turn attacked by thugs who
want the baton. He is helped by another young man, the cryptic and soft-spoken
Jimmy, who finally retrieves the baton after a bloody confrontation, and
reluctantly hands it over to Lok.
Whistle has recovered enough to asks for a deal with the police.
Big D orders to kill Whistle.
This all happens in jail, with the police tolerating all the negotiations
between the two camps.
But nobody needs to kill Whistle: he commits suicide at the hospital when he
learns that his son has been run over by a truck, presumably an assassination
planned by the Triad.
(Confusingly, Lok takes credit for killing Whistle in a conversation with Jimmy.)
The police release Big D. Lok and his men are outside waiting for him.
Lok offers him a truce.
Big D accepts, and they become good buddies.
When a traitor offers Big D an alliance to kill Lok, Big D alerts Lok and
together they defeat the traitor. The pair now rules over Hong Kong.
They go fishing together. Big D brings his wife and Lok brings his son.
Big D asks for Lok's support in getting elected chairman.
Suddenly, Lok grabs a big rock and kills Big D. Lok keeps dropping the heavy
rock on Big D's head even after the man is already dead.
Big D's wife and Lok's teenage son witness the brutal murder.
Lok chases Big D's wife through the woods and strangles her to death.
The boy runs to the car and can hear the woman scream.
Lok buries both bodies and then drives away with his son.
Elsewhere, Jimmy is being groomed to become chairman some day...
Hak Se Wui Ji Wo Wai Gwai/ Black Society - Harmony is a Virtue/
Triad Election/ Election 2 (2006), the follow-up to Election, is probably a better film, focusing on the most complex character, Jimmy.
Lok, the chairman of his Hong Kong triad, gives a speech of unity.
Jimmy is now a businessman who has won a contract to build a new highway in mainland China. His business partner is the older Kwok, who accepts to invest in the project.
Kwok is only concerned that Jimmy's triad past does not become an obstacle.
Jimmy and his wife climb a hill overlooking the project, dreaming of building their house on the top, and raising their children there.
Jimmy has dinner with the other four "godsons", candidates to succeed Lok as chairman when his two-year term comes up.
Jimmy is the one who made the most money, starting with a business of pirated porn videos.
Kun went to prison for killing a cop and wants to run at the next election.
At another dinner Jimmy meets businessman Hui, who too does business in China, and is too a member of a triad.
Hui introduces Jimmy to Shi, head of the Chinese bureau of security, who warns him not to follow Lok who is out of control. She knows that an election is coming up and hints that Jimmy should run for chairman
Shi warns Jimmy that his friend Soo will be arrested in two days.
Jimmy tries in vain to reach Soo.
Back home, Jimmy meets with "uncle" Teng, the most influential of the elders, who wants Jimmy to run for chairman.
Jimmy, however, wants to become a "clean" businessman.
Meanwhile, Lok meets his right-hand man Jet, who is still in hiding as the cops are looking for him. Lok wants Jet to run for chairman.
Jimmy
and his right-hand man Lik
meet a corrupt Chinese official in a restaurant. The official has procured the permits for his highway project in record time and
Jimmy has to pay the bribe.
Soo walks into the same restaurant and Jimmy realizes that cops have surrounded
the place to arrest Soo. Shi's cops arrest Soo and then Shi takes the
opportunity to also arrest Jimmy, confiscating the bribe money.
Meanwhile, Lok meets with uncle Teng and tells him that he wants to run again, a fact that goes against tradition. Uncle Teng strongly disapproves.
Lok is informed that Jimmy is uncle Teng's first choice.
Meanwhile, Shi explains to the jailed Jimmy that Hui is chairman of a triad and therefore he can do business in China: if Jimmy wants to do business in China, he must become chairman of his triad. Jimmy is released from jail but is forbidden to do business in mainland China until he becomes the chairman of a triad.
Meanwhile, Lok is summoned by his son Denny's high-school because the boy has joined a gang and the principal threatens to expel him.
Meanwhile, Jimmy's lawyer introduces Jimmy to Bo, a ferocious hitman, who becomes an essential bodyguard.
While fishing by the river,
Lok asks Kun to support him promising to support him next time.
Kun says they have to stop Jimmy and Lok agrees, basically approving that Kun
assassinates Jimmy.
The uncles tell Jimmy that his right-hand man Lik is a snitch, and that's an obstacle to his election.
Jimmy coldly sets up a trap and has Lik killed.
Lok, Kun, Big Head and others wear masks and
kidnap Jimmy's business partner Kwok. They seal him in a coffin and, to teach
a lesson to Big Head, who is not respectful enough, seal Big Head in the same
coffin, with just enough holes to breath.
Lok tells Jimmy to give up the race and Kwok will be released, but Jimmy refuses: he also knows that, once chairman, he will be able to find funding elsewhere in China.
Lok travels to a cemetery and breaks into the niche where he hid the
dragon baton of chairman.
Lok meets uncle Teng who repeats that he is strongly opposed to Lok running again for chairman and that Jimmy is his choice to succeed him. Unable to change his mind, Lok murders uncle Teng by pushing him down a spiral staircase.
Lok then gives a gun to Jet to kill Jimmy, promising he'll make Jet the next chairman.
Jimmy realizes that something is wrong while dining with his wife
and asks her to run out from the backdoor.
Just then someone informs Jimmy that uncle Teng is dead.
Jet captures his wife and then tells him of Lok's promise.
Jimmy tells Jet that Lok wants a second term and will kill Jet once Jet has killed him, Lok's main rival.
Jet lets them go.
Jimmy tortures psychologically and physically four of Kun's thugs until two of them accept to kill Lok.
Jimmy personally cuts the body of one of the four and then feeds the meat to the guard dogs.
Kun's gang traps Jimmy in an alley but Jimmy and Bo outsmart Kun's men.
Bo also find the coffin with Kwok and Big Head.
Jimmy's men also briefly capture Kun but Kun kills them in front of Jimmy.
Abandoned by Bo during the fight,
the coffin with Big Head and Kwok, still alive, is found by the police.
Meanwhile Lok's son is forced to join a gang, but Lok arrives with henchmen and humiliates the punks of the gang.
Denny runs away terrified and Lok has to chase him all over town.
The hitmen who accepted to kill him after being tortured by Jimmy run into
a breathless Lok who can't catch up with his boy.
The unsuspecting Lok enters their car voluntarily and they massacre him.
The "uncles" meet to elect the new chairman. Kun is missing so there is only one candidate: Jimmy.
But first they want Jimmy to swear that he didn't kill Lok.
Jimmy swears. Since the killers are not from Jimmy's gang, nobody can prove that he is lying.
All the uncles vote for Jimmy.
On the way home Jimmy sees a bleeding Jet being chased by a gang and after
hesitating turns the car and rescues him.
Jimmy offers Jet protection in return for his services.
Jet doesn't reply and throws away Jimmy's business car.
Jimmy meets Shi in mainland China who welcomes Jimmy to continue his business project of a highway. Shi will also make sure that the government approves the
construction of Jimmy's dream house on the hill.
Shi gives Jimmy the dragon baton that Lok hid: Shi's cops always followed Lok's moves inside China.
In return Shi wants Jimmy to remain the chairman forever, and wants that his son would some day succeed him, so that the triad would become a family business.
Shi wants stability, an end to infighting.
Jimmy protests that he only wants to be a businessman.
He wants his son to become a lawyer or a doctor, not a gangster.
Shi explains that Hong Kong will become a safer place.
Jimmy even punches Shi repeatedly in the face. Shi simply replies "thank you for your cooperation", implying that Jimmy has no choice.
At uncle Teng's funeral, Jimmy secretly leaves the dragon baton in the coffin, to be buried with Teng.
Later, Jimmy's wife announces that she is pregnant.
Instead of being happy, Jimmy is anxious: his child isn't born yet and is already doomed to become a gangster.
Fong Juk/ Exiled (2006) is basically a Western movie, in fact
a diligent tribute to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and one of his best films altogether.
It is a poem to doomed loyalty.
It is also a comedy, with humorous skits that cleverly add to the sense of impending tragedy.
And the final message is no less ironic and satirical, as well as cynical:
the only survivor
and winner out of the manly mayhem is the prostitute; and the only other
survivors are another woman (the widow) and two police officers, a corrupt one
and a coward one. The winners are not the four gunmen who believe in
eternal loyalty but selfish ordinary people.
It is also a self-tribute of sorts because the four gunmen are played by the same actors as To's The Mission and in similar roles. This film also returns to the theme of gangsters who find meaning in deadly loyalty like in Zhen Xin Ying Xiong/ A Hero Never Dies (1998).
The action is set in the year before Hong Kong was returned by Britain to China.
In Macau, the other old Western outpost, two gunmen are charged by their
boss Fay to kill Wo, a retired gangster that now has a humble job and simply
wants to have a family life with his wife and their little baby in a humble
apartment. Blaze and Fat are confronted by their old friends Tai and Cat,
who are opposed to killing their common friend Wo.
A cowardly middle-aged cop, who is about to retire in three days, gets caught
in the firestorm and calls Fay to beg for his life.
But not much happens: the four gangsters shoot a lot but try to miss and in
the end they make peace and eat dinner together.
In fact, the four gunmen later help Wo improve the apartment and treat his
wife and baby as their own family.
Fay, however, is not happy that they didn't kill Wo.
The five visit Jeff, the owner of a brothel that features a stunning prostitute,
and Jeff tells them of two potential deals. The first one is to kill Fay's
rival Keung at a dinner. The other one is to steal a gold shipment.
At the dinner, however, Fay shows up just when the five have taken position
around Keung's table. Fay confronts Blaze who failed to kill Wo. Fay shoots him
in the chest but Blaze is saved by his bulletproof vest. Wo shoots Fay, wounding
him in the groin, and this starts a massive shootout between Fay's men,
Keung's men and the five gunmen. Wo is wounded. Fay and Keung strike a temporary
peace and join forces in chasing the give gunmen.
The five friends are still driving Wo's humble van that breaks down. They have to steal a car.
Wo wants to go home but his
friends take him to an illegal doctor. The doctor is in bed with the sexy
prostitute but the four friends pay all their money for him to take care of Wo's
wound. The prostitute sees where the doctor stores the money. The operation
is interrupted by Fay's men who barge in and demand that the doctor takes care
of their boss. Soon they recognize each other and another massive shootout
erupts. The four friends escape without Wo, while the prostitute takes advantage
of the chaos and steals the doctor's money. Fay takes hold of the wounded
Wo and throws him out of the window and then starts shooting at the dying Wo
to lure the four friends in the open. They eventually manage to rescue Wo
but he demands to die at home. They drive him home where his wife is furious
with them. When Wo dies, she grabs a gun and starts shooting at his friends
(who risked their lives to try and save him). Wo's wife is desperate and
briefly considers killing herself and the baby before setting fire to the
apartment. The wife sets out to hunt them down and take her revenge, presumably
considering them responsible for Wo's death.
The car stolen by the four gunmen breaks down and they try in vain to
jumpstart it. Eventually they start walking, except that they are in
the middle of nowhere and it is very hot.
To decide which direction to follow, they flip a coin.
They rejoice when they finally hit a creek and can drink.
By accident, they realize that they ended up very near the place where
the convoy carrying the gold is about to transit. Again, they flip a coin
to decide whether to attack the convoy or not: the coin says "no" and they
content themselves with watching the convoy drive by. Suddenly gunfire erups:
another much bigger gang is attacking the police officers. The gang kills
the entire escort except one heroic cop who is a superhuman shooter.
The four friends are watching unseen and truly root for the lonely cop,
even reflecting light to the sniper hiding on the tree so that the cop
can spot him. When the cop is left without munitions, the four friends
come out in the open and kill all the remaining gangsters. The cop turns to
them with his pathetic pistol and seems ready to die than to surrender.
He explains to them that, if suspected of stealing the gold, he would be
killed anyway. Blaze offers him a deal: split the gold with them.
They transport the gold bullions to a port and load a yacht.
Meanwhile, Wo's widow has been searching for them all over town and eventually
ran into the usual prostitute who sent her to Fay.
Just then Blaze gets a call from Fay: he has kidnapped Wo's widow and
the baby and threatens to kill them. This time flipping the coin is pointless:
Blaze decides to save Wo's family and the other three are with him.
They tell the cop that they will be back by sunrise.
The four friends enter the brothel where Fay is waiting for them. They know
it is a trap and decide to take one last picture together in a fast photo
booth. Wo's wife still believes that Blaze is responsible for Wo's death
and shoots him in the chest. Again, the bulletproof vest saves him, and then
Wo's wife cannot find the strength to shoot him in the head.
Tai offers Fay the gold in return for their release (and shows him a bag full
of bullions) and the release of Wo's
family. Fay accepts except that he still wants to kill Blaze for disobeying him.
Blaze would agree but his friends decide to stay after telling Wo's widow
to drive to the port and take off with the cop (and the gold).
The four friends start shooting at Fay's men and they all get killed, but also
kill Fay. In fact, the only survivor is the usual prostitute, who grabs the
bag of gold and leaves the brothel.
The psychological thriller
Mad Detective (2007), co-directed with Wai Ka-Fai, is both a long
hallucination and a mathematical puzzle. The hallucination is due to the man
who can see other people's personalities. The puzzle is due to some guns that
get switched and that future generations will use to reconstruct the final
scene: the lone survivor needs to arrange the guns in a way that will tell
his version of the facts, not the truth that would get him fired.
Visually this is also one of To's most experimental films, especially during
the scenes in the maze of mirror where everything is multiplied, distorted
and fragmented, reflecting the mental illness of the two enemies.
One is endowed with supernatural powers but those supernatural powers also
fool himself about his wife's presence. The other one is a Hitchcock-ian
or Brian DePalma-esque case of psychiatric disorder.
Bun is the "mad detective", a detective who can solve unsolvable cases because
he has visions of what happened. One day he cuts his ear to give it as a gift
to his boss. He gets fired from the police.
One day two police officers are waiting patiently in a car. One of the two,
Wong, realizes that the other one is responsible for small thefts carried out
at the station. Just then they spot the Indian thief they were waiting for.
They chase him and there's a moment when a cop and the thief face each other
but don't shoot.
Eighteen months later Ho is the cop investigating the mysterious disappearance
of Wong, who never returned from that night. The other one, Chi-wai, claims
that Wong was killed by the Indian thief. Meanwhile someone has been committing
robberies and murders using Wong's gun.
Ho visits Bun and asks him for help. Bun's wife makes a scene because she thinks
that he will get killed on this case, and since he has been fired he has no
reason to get involved. Bu slaps her and leaves with Ho.
Bun can see a person's multiple personalities. He follows Chi-wai in the
street and see him split into seven people, including a woman who is the brain
and a fat old man who is the wisdom. Then he spies him at a restaurant where
we hear the woman speak to the fat old man and Chi repeat the same words.
Bun follows Chi-wai to the men's rooms and pees on his pants: first he is
peeing on the pants of the fat old man, who doesn't react, and then the fat
old man mutates into the woman, who attacks him and smashes his forehead into
a mirror. Chi-wai pulls out the gun and is about to kill Bun, but the seven
personalities grab him and pull him back, as ordered by the woman personality.
And then Ho enters the men's rooms and points his gun at Chi-wai: Chi-wai
puts his gun back into his pants and says that he's tired of this endless
investigation.
Ho, who can only see Chi-wai and not the seven personalities, is incredulous.
Bun tells him that he, Ho, has only one personality, that of a young shy boy.
Bun, who now wears a bandage around his head, knows exactly what happened
and drives frantically to the sites of the two robberies: he enters the
places brandishing a non-existing gun (his hand) and pretending to shoot
people, and we see the flashbacks of what happened (the robberies happened
exactly like he is guessing except that the robber and murderer was masked).
Bun and Ho have dinner at a restaurant.
Ho invites his girlfriend Gigi and Bun calls his wife to join them... except that he doesn't have a cell
phone and is only simulating the phone call with his hand...
and except that she never comes: nobody sits in the chair with them, but he
talks to her and orders food for her. The
restaurant owner tells Ho that this has been going on for a while: Bun shows
up alone but pretending that his wife is with him. He is clearly crazy.
Now we realize that Bun's wife was not in the apartment when Ho visited him
and Bun's imagination constructed the altercation.
Ho still has faith in Bun's superhuman skills for solving cases so he takes
Bun in the woods when Wong disappeared. Bun tells Ho that the way to find the
corpse is to bury yourself in a grave, so they dig a grave and then Ho lies
in it. It is a trick: Bun steals Ho's gun and badge and, after meeting the
vision of Chi-wai searching for his gun, starts his own investigation.
When Ho gets out of his grave and realizes that Bun has
stolen his gun, he heads for Bun's apartment and breaks in.
He is arrested by Bun's his ex-wife,
who really exists and is a policewoman, and
who is in the apartment waiting for Bun,
but Ho explains that he is a police officer.
She left Bun when he went crazy.
She is there because has been informed that Bun has not seen the psychiatrist
in a while and that he is not taking his medications.
Meanwhile Bun, pretending
to be Ho, searches Chi-wai's office and cabinets. He finds files on the Indian
thief, money and other objects that seem to confirm his theory. Then Bun buries
himself in the forest and sees what happened 18 months earlier.
Chi-wai (in his fat old man personality) lost his gun,
the Indian thief stole it, Chi-wai killed Wong and stole
his gun. When he faced the Indian thief, Chi-wai didn't kill him because he
was using Wong's gun. In his mind (in his cynical woman's personality) Chi-wai
figured that he had to make it believe that the Indian killed Wong, in which
case Wong could not have killed the Indian.
Now Chi-wai's woman personality calls the police and informs them of the
Indian's whereabouts after staging the scene: when Ho arrives in the apartment,
he finds the masks used by the murders in the robberies and other items
incriminating the Indian. Ho also finds Wong's badge on the floor.
His own gun has been stolen by Bun so he borrows a gun from a female friend,
Gigi. Bun warns Ho that Chi-wai will kill the Indian. But Ho has trouble
believing Bun anymore because Bun's hallucinations are getting worse:
Ho is scared of Bun, especially since Bun has stolen his gun.
At one point Bun's ex-wife walks into the car and Bun sees the fake wife sitting in the back while the real one is sitting in the front. Nonetheless his ex-wife
(the real one) asks him for help to solve an unsolved case. She knows that Bun
follows all cases simply by reading about them in newspapers that are pasted
all over the house. Bun immediately tells her that the nephew did it.
Ho too trusts Bun's theory. Ho walks into Chi-wai's office as himself: the
people there have seen Bun as Ho, so there is a bit of confusion. Ho
arrests Chi-wai based on Bun's theory that Chi-wai is using Wong's gun:
what Bun doesn't know is that Chi-wai changed his gun's serial number in the computer, so the computer now shows that Wong's gun is Chi-wai's gun.
Ho is confused: Bun's theory has collapsed.
Chi-wai invites Ho to accompany him to arrest the Indian. Bun desperately
tries to warn Ho that Chi-wai intends to kill both the Indian and Ho himself.
Ho still follows Chi-wai and helps him arrest the Indian. Bun follows them
and sees eight people: the seven personalities of Chi-wai and the young boy
of Ho's personality. They move in a maze of mirrors, that further amplifies
the effect of multiple personalities. Bun arrives in time to stop the killings:
Bun points his gun at Chi-wai who points his gun to the Indian, and Ho points
his gun at Bun to stop him from killing Chi-wai. For a few seconds they are
all paralyzed.
Bun is holding Ho's gun, Ho is holding Gigi's gun, the Indian is holding
Chi-wai's gun, and Chi-wai is holding Wong's gun.
Then Chi-wai shoots the Indian and Ho shoots Bun to protect
Chi-wai. Chi-wai pretends to arrest the Indian but instead finishes him off,
then he turns and shoots Ho, just like Bun had anticipated.
The shootout breaks the mirrors.
Bun is still alive and walks straight towards Chi-wai. A voice inside him
tells him that, if he kills Chi-wai, Bun will become just one of these
heartless murders, but another voice concludes that Bun is human like all
the others, so he pulls the trigger and kills Chi-wai.
Then he dies.
Now Ho, the lone survivor, has to rearrange the guns so that the investigation will confirm whichever story he decides to concoct.
Linger (2008)
Man Jeuk/ Sparrow (2007) was an odd tribute to Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
The English-language film Fuchou/ Vengeance (2009), written by Ka-fai Wai, is about revenge but also about loyalty and memory.
It is a bit confused with a plot that moves in several directions (a Memento- like direction, a Wild Bunch-like direction, a Melville-ian direction, etc) without truly excelling at any.
The film takes place in Macau.
A man and his children have just come home on a rainy day while his French wife is cooking lunch when someone rings the bell. Seconds later the man is shot dead through the front door even before opening it. The French wife grabs a gun and shoots, wounding one of the attackers, but the attackers shoot back.
The woman's father, Francis, visits her at the hospital. She is seriously wounded and cannot speak but, by pointing words in a newspaper, she informs her
father that there were three attackers and she
shot one of them in the ear.
He swears revenge. Outside he is confronted by the female detective who is in
charge of the case. We learn that he is a restaurant owner.
From the pictures lying on the detective's desk we learn that the woman's children were killed.
Meanwhile, a triad boss, Fung, hires a professional hitman, Kwai, to kill his unfaithful classy girlfriend and her lover.
The professional follows the woman into a hotel, where she meets her lover.
The professional and two cohorts, all wearing suit and tie, break into the
lovers' room while they are having wild sex and shoot them without saying a word.
Coincidentally, Francis enters the same hotel and takes a room at the same floor. He sees the hitmen walk out of the room and they see him: they stare at each other briefly, then Francis walks to his room and they walk away.
The same detective is assigned to the case and meets Francis again.
Francis is the only witness and is asked to identify a suspect, but Francis
refuses to recognize him. Later Francis follows the suspect, Chu, who is indeed one of the three hitmen.
He leads him to the other two, Kwai and Fat Lok.
He tells them that he has a job for them and offers them a lot of money, his home and his restaurant to find the killers of his son-in-law and grandchildren.
He takes pictures of them to remember them and writes their names on the pictures.
Francis then sees his daughter off to France, and stays back in Macau.
Francis and the trio inspect his daughter's house in order to reconstruct
the murder. A flashback shows up how the Frenchwoman hid the children in a closet and searched for the gun while the three hooded men walked into the house,
how she shot them and they shot back, how one of the killers found the children
in the closet and had to shoot them because they had seen his face.
While the three hitmen look at the pictures of the family album, Francis cooks
a fancy lunch for them.
They have a few clues to find the killers: one is left-handed,
one is a sort of Mad Max with a big gun,
and one has a wounded ear.
Francis shows them that he knows how to use a gun.
Kwai takes him to the junkyard of his cousin Tony.
Tony sells guns illegally and they get one for Francis.
Tony tells Kwai that he sold a Mad Max kind of gun to a Hong Kong gangster
nicknamed Python. As they look for Python in Hong Kong,
Kwai and Chu see a man with a bandaged ear.
He joins another man. Kwai, Francis, Chu and Fat Lok follow the two men
to a picnic area where they meet the third man and their wives and children.
Francis stares from a distance as the children play around the picnic table.
The killers notice that they are being watched and confront Francis and Kwai's
trio. The killers easily confess that they are the killers and then return
to their families. They even send children with hot food to the foursome.
When the children and women leave, the two groups of men start shooting at
each other, but it's already dark and they keep missing each other.
Eventually the three killers flee. Francis is seriously wounded.
Fat Lok is wounded in the butt. Kwai is wounded too.
Kwai's gang take Francis to an apartment where they remove the bullets from each other.
Francis reveals that he is a former hitman and has a bullet in his brain, and
doesn't know how long he has to live. His memory is bad because of that brain injury.
While Francis is unconscious,
triad boss Fung calls Kwai and tells him that three of his men have been wounded by three Chinese men and a foreigner... Now we know who ordered the hit on
Francis' family.
Fung wants Kwai to help the three killers and gives him the address where they
are hiding.
Kwai, Chu and Fat Lok break into the place and kill the three.
Informed, Fung calls Kwai and asks for an explanation: Kwai tells him the truth.
Fung explains that he wanted Francis' son-in-law killed because he was about to
turn him in.
Fung sends more men to kill Kwai's gang.
Kwai and his buddies escape but lose Francis in the dark alleys of the city.
When they meet again, Francis has forgotten who they are: he only knows that
he has pictures of them with their names.
When they see on TV the pictures of the men they killed, Francis does not
recognize them. Kwai's men explain that those are his enemies. Francis is
puzzled. They show him a picture of his daughter at the hospital but Francis
does not recognize her. They tell him that he is after revenge, but Francis
doesn't seem to understand what revenge means.
Kwai leaves Francis with a friend, "Big Mama", who is taking care of several children in her humble beach restaurant. Francis sit at the table with them and eats with them, apparently unable to remember his own story.
Kwai is worried about cousin Tony who doesn't answer the phone. We see that he
is being tortured. When Kwai's gang arrive at the junkyard, Tony is still alive
and tells them where to find his hidden weapons and ammunitions.
Then he dies and now it's time for Kwai's revenge against Fung.
Fung's men attack Kwai, Chu and Fat Lok and kill each of them while Fung watches
in delight.
Francis and Big Mama learn of their death from the TV news.
The woman cries and the children fall silent (Kwai's wife and children?)
That night Francis is haunted by the vision of his daughter's family and Kwai's
gang and finally remembers.
One day Kwai's wife and children help Francis identify Fung: the children
put stickers on Fung's coat.
Then Francis walks in with a gun and starts shooting at Fung and his men.
Fung is wearing a bulletproof vest but Francis chases him through the alleys,
always looking for the coat with the stickers.
Fung eventually figures out that Francis doesn't know him and is only looking for the stickers and so he throws away the coat. While searching for Fung,
Francis kills all of Fung's men.
Fung is afraid of engaging Francis in a duel.
Fung, convinced that there are no stickers on him, comes out of his hiding place
and walks right in front of Francis. However, there is a sticker on his tie.
Francis shoots him dead in the deserted street.
In the last scene Francis lives with Kwai's wife and many children at the beach.
Dyut Mind Gam/ Life Without Principle (2011) is another crime drama but this time
set within the greedy financial world.
Daan San Naam Neoi/ Don't Go Breaking My Heart (2011) and
Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 (2014)
are romantic comedies co-directed again with Wai.
Gao HAi Ba Zhi Lian II/ High-altitude Romance II/ Romancing in Thin Air (2012) is a romantic drama.
Du Zhan/ Drug War (2012), written by
Nai-Hoi Yau and others, may appear to be yet another brutal action movies, but it is also
a metaphysical parable of evil.
Just like To's models for this film, namely
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and
Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic, harbor a deeper meaning than the
relatively simplistic plot, so Drug War has a subplot of an extremely
clever satan who is willing to sacrifice and betray everybody, from his wife
to his loyal servants, a mind who can continuously process logical steps
to maximizes his own chances of surviving.
At the beginning we feel that the police captain is the protagonist. He is the
character that gets developed more fully, and who gets the heroic treatment;
but then the real protagonist emerges and it is the ultimate anti-hero, a coward
who cares absolutely zero about the rest of the world.
A side-story has to do with the way that technology helps watch undercover
operations as if they were television shows:
we see most of the first part twice, because many of the scenes are broadcast to
surveillance systems and shown in black and white inside the small screens of
the computers.
A man, Timmy Choi, is driving erratically on a wide road and eventually loses
control and crashes into a restaurant while throwing up white foam.
Meanwhile two men, who look like they are high on drugs,
are driving a green truck through a highway toll, followed by a red car.
Meanwhile, a bus arrives at the same highway toll. One of the man inside senses
that something is wrong. He is right: his partner is an undercover police
captain, Zhang Lei, the girl at the tool booth is his trusted and attractive
young assistant Xiaobei, and the whole area is surrounded by police officers that arrest
all the passengers of the bus. They are all carrying drugs inside their body.
They are taken to a hospital where they are forced to defecate the packets of
drugs.
Timmy ends up, unconscious, in the same hospital and Zhang easily recognizes that he is another drug dealer.
Zhang inspects Timmy's car and finds the cell phone that was ringing when he
crashed. Zhang calls the number that was calling Timmy: it rings inside the
green truck, that is still being followed by a red car.
Timmy escapes at the hospital but Zhang catches him hiding in the morgue.
Zhang sends his own men to replace
the cops in the red car that have been following the green truck from very
far away.
Zhang finds three dead bodies in a warehouse turned into a laboratory for
making drugs: the factory had exploded and only Timmy had survived.
They are Timmy's wife and her two brothers.
Zhang interrogates Timmy, who admits that the green truck is carrying raw
material for him. He has to make drugs for a kingpin, Bill Lee, whom Zhang
has been wanting to arrest for a long time.
Timmy knows that he will get the death penalty unless he collaborates: he
offers to help Zhang frame Bill Lee. First Timmy takes Zhang to an appointment
with a comical character nicknamed "Ha Ha" because he is always laughing loud.
Ha Ha wants to meet Bill Lee and Zhang pretends to be working for the boss.
Everything that Ha Ha says, during a lavish dinner, about their business is broadcasted
live to the police station by Zhang's cigarette holder that contains a camera.
The high-tech crew at the police station is directed by Zhang's assistant Xiaobei.
Next, Timmy organizes the meeting with
Bill Lee's trusted nephew, who is permanently under the influence of heavy drugs.
Zhang plays Ha Ha and his assistant Xiaobei plays his wife
while their police team watches the meeting remotely broadcasted by a tiny
camera. Bill's trusted nephew submits Zhang to an orgy of heavy drugs to test his credibility.
Zhang has no choice but to accept. After Bill's trusted nephew leaves, convinced that he can do
business with the man he believes to be Ha Ha, Zhang is seized by epileptic
fits. Timmy shouts that they have to make him vomit and tells the cops what
to do to save Zhang's life. It works. So far Timmy has fully cooperated and
never tried to escape. In the middle of the night the
green truck crashes in a remote location. The cops that were following the truck
call Zhang. The two dudes of the truck are acting more funny than ever,
obviously stoned senseless.
Zhang, Timmy and Zhang's cute assistant Xiaobei take the bullet train and then meet
local police. They get to the place where the truck is.
Timmy cooperates behaving realistically with his two men. At one point he has
one of their guns in his hands but throws it away instead of trying to escape.
Timmy drives the truck full of raw material to his other factory. He is welcomed
by his workers: a group of loyal deaf-mutes who are happy to see him as if he
was a family member. It turns out that Timmy is fluent in sign language.
As instructed by Zhang, Timmy places cameras and microphones around the
building. During dinner with the deaf-mutes, Timmy cries and says (or, better,
gestures) that he is crying because his wife died (but maybe he is crying
because he is betraying such loyal buddies).
The deaf-mute decided to pay tribute to the dead wife by burning a huge amount
of money in front of Timmy.
Zhang is ready to order the attack: cops storm the yacht where the real Ha Ha
is delivering drugs to Timmy; and other corps storm Timmy's factory, despite
the ferocious resistance of the deaf-mutes,
who manage to escape and to blow up the building killing many of Zhang's
cops. Zhang is furious at Timmy for not having told them about the secret
passage (did Timmy try to save his loyal deaf-mutes?) Zhang is about to
ship him back to headquarters when Timmy begs him to continue the operation.
Timmy reveals that Bill Lee is just a front for the real kingpins.
Impersonating Ha Ha, Zhang meets Bill Lee in person. It turns out that Bill Lee
is simply taking orders on a earpiece from the seven real bosses who are walking
around the port and checking everything that is going on.
The seven bosses don't want to reveal their faces but Zhang/Ha Ha manages a
trick to make them come out. Later the bosses decide to execute Bill and his
nephew, who failed to protect their identities. Now Zhang and his high-tech
crew can target the real bosses directly.
The green truck is still driving around, loaded with precious merchandise,
The two deaf-mutes on the loose comunicate only via a code transmitted by cell
phone, but now they don't trust the messages they receive.
Timmy, who has been instructed to lead the bosses in the trap, suddenly
switches sides, removing the microphones from his clothes
and telling the bosses that they are surrounded by cops.
The cops grab the guns and a chaotic shootout erupts in front of a school.
Timmy hides inside a school bus. He sees Xiaobei lying on the road wounded after
being run over by a car, and drives by to finish her with a bullet.
Police and mobsters reach an impasse.
Timmy drives the school bus where the mobsters are and opens the door.
The elderly bosses run towards the bus. Timmy shuts the door and drives away,
leaving them an easy target for the cops. Having helped the police capture the
bosses, he flees. By accident he crashes into the car driven by the deafmutes.
Knowing that he betrayed them, they pull out the guns.
Zhang, chasing the school bus, gets there to witness the
shootout between Timmy and the deafmutes.
Timmy is caught between the deafmutes, who are determined to kill him, and
the cops, who are waiting to see who wins. Timmy raises his hands and surrenders
to the cops. Zhang aims at him and would probably want to execute him right
there but he can't. Zhang handcuffs Timmy to the car and then helps the other
cops corner the deafmutes. The deafmutes, however, put up an heroic struggle
and manage to wound or kill all the cops, although they get fatally wounded too.
Meanwhile, Timmy manages to free himself. He walks coldly towards the bodies
lying on the asphalt, grabs a gun and finishes them one by one. Before he can
escape, however, Zhang, with his last breath, handcuffs Timmy's ankle to his own
arm. Timmy tries in vain to free himself from Zhang's dying body. Timmy has
to drag the dead body on the asphalt while trying to escape. Lots of cops
arrive at the scene and arrest him.
Timmy is the only survivor of the whole story, but at the trial he is found
guilty by the judge and promptly executed. While they strap him to the apparatus
that will kill him, Timmy begs for another chance to cooperate, but the only
person listening to his new confession is the guard who witnesses his death.
Mang Taam/ Blind Detective (2013)
Waa Lai Seong Baan Zeok/ Office (2015), an adaptation of Sylvia Chang's play "Design for Living" (2008), borrows overtones of
the operetta and the farce to concoct
a bitter satire of the financial world.
Passengers on a subway train can't resist reading the book "How to become the richest man" that one passenger is reading.
A young man, Xiang Lee, rushes to his new workplace, the high-rise building of the corporation Jones & Sunn, but has to wait in a long line for an elevator.
A security guard helps a young woman to the front of the line and he thinks he can
take the same elevator but the security guard stops him: that elevator only
goes straight to the 71st floor.
Xiang meets the same young woman while waiting for the orientation, hence they are both newly hired, and asks her
why she's entitled to take the executive elevator. Kat introduces herself but
doesn't have time to reply because two senior employees take them for a tour
of the floor and explain to them what each executive likes to drink, which
Xiang memorizes on the fly.
Meanwhile, a group of financial officers is escorted to a meeting with the female CEO, Winnie Chang, and the male chairman, Chung-ping Ho.
Ho, who is married, and Chang are lovers and she used to be his secretary.
Ho's wife is from a rich family.
The company has grown rapidly and now is negotiating its IPO.
Xiang and Kat are given a first assignment: the chairman's right-arm man, David,
tells them to write a business letter. Xiang frantically takes notes but Kat
creates the letter on the fly. She then reveals she graduated from Harvard.
David doesn't remember seeing her resume and asks her whether she was recommended by a top executive. They are interrupted before she can answer but we see
that she was advised by the chairman in person.
And later we see her visiting her mother at the hospital: the mother is in a coma and Kat believes that she is mad at her father.
Sophie is a manager who has a fiance somewhere but has been chasing David.
Her fiance, who doesn't live in the city, is dumping her because she doesn't want to quit the job and leave the city to marry him.
David, in turn, flirts with CEO Chang.
Everybody knows that Sophie is in love with David.
David drives Sophie home in the middle of a violent storm.
Xiang takes an opportunity to chat with CEO Chang and impresses her with his determination to succeed.
The following day David informs Chang that a potential partner company from the USA will visit and she asks that Xiang and Kat be invited to the dinner. She tells David that the enthusiastic dreamer Chang reminds her of him when he was younger.
Chang scolds Kat for calling her "auntie", for wearing expensive shoes and for driving to work in a limo instead of taking the subway like most employees:
Kat is supposed to be there incognito.
At the business dinner David presides (Chang and Ho don't attend) while in
another room of the same restaurant Ho and Chang discuss the IPO, concerned
about the financial collapse that just took place in the USA (a reference to the 2007 financial crisis).
After the dinner Xiao sees that Kat is driven away by a limo while he is running to the subway train, and that's after seeing her take the executive elevator.
After the dinner David is drunk. He stops to get a coffee at a store and meets Sophie who
tells him not to drink and drive. She offers him her couch for the night.
Xiang confronts Kat about her true identity. Kat lies that her father is a limo driver and the security guard at the elevator a friend of her father.
Xiang has fallen in love with her and believe anything she says.
Chang gives Xiang a special assignment (to tour some factories of lingerie) and asks him to keep a secret.
Based on Xiang's report, Chang then offers a deal to the US company: to make lingerie.
Sensing that Chang has a preference for the young Xiang, David becomes jealous of Xiang.
Chang doesn't tell chairman Ho: she's scheming behind his back.
Ho learns of the proposal from Xiang himself, who doesn't know that Ho is unaware of Chang's plot.
Asian stocks plummet causing turmoil at the firm, particularly for David who has been trying to outsmart Chang.
Suddenly, Kat's mom comes out of the coma but falls into another coma right away.
Kat confronts her father, chairman Ho, about his extramarital relationship with Chang
and warns him that she's plotting with David behind his back, but her father
calmly replies that he doesn't care.
Alone in the office, Sophie breaks up with her fiance during a painful phone conversation.
Ho sees his daughter Kat argue with Xiang when he shows up late for a date: Kat
complains that he has changed since he got the secret assignment from Chang
to visit lingerie factories.
David is happy to hear that Sophie broke up with her boyfriend and
tells her that she's the woman of his life. Then he asks her to alter the
accounting records for him, which is illegal. She realizes that he's taking
advantage of her but she is lonely and depressed and eventually surrenders.
Then David disappears. The bank keeps calling his office about some money that David owes. A desperate David calls Sophie asking her to steal money from the firm, which of course Sophie refuses to do. David calls again and this time Chang intercepts the call and hears David asking Sophie to meet on the rooftop.
Chang meets David on the rooftop. At first he tries to kill her, then she begs for her help and kisses her passionately.
Sophie arrives in time to see the whole scene and walks away disgusted.
Chang slaps David in the face and David leaves.
At a formal reception, Ho announces that he has called off the IPO, officially because of the financial crisis, and that some employees have been fired for financial irregularities (Sophie and David) and that the US partner will launch a lingerie line targeting mainland China.
He publicly credits Xiang for the idea. And announces that his daughter Kat
has been appointed to lead the company in mainland China.
Chang knows that now she has to resign.
Xiang is angry that Kat lied to him about being the daughter of a limo driver,
but Kat kisses him: she has fallen in love with the innocent, honest and
hard-working dreamer.
Ho visits his wife at the hospital and tells her that she won while Chang is
leaving the office for the last time.
Saam Jan Hang/ Three (2016)
Ngoh Dik Kyuhn Wohng Naahm Yauh/ Chasing Dream (2019)
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