Ah, at last a Johnny To–produced film I just simply don’t like. I was beginning to think such a beast didn’t exist.
Starring Lau Ching Wan (Running Out of Time, Mighty Baby) and Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, Hard–Boiled), this is the first feature directed by Patrick Yau, who followed it up with Expect the Unexpected. Having now seen both, I begin to know his obsessions, and I think Expect the Unexpected may end up being the only movie of his I like.
The action is set in Macau, mostly during a single day and night. (There is no apparent reason for misspelling “night” in the title.) Tony Leung plays a cop who is also the chief enforcer for one of two Triad bosses that are struggling for supremacy in the city. That struggle is reaching a peak, and an old, superior Triad boss is coming to Macau the next day, for the first time in ten years, to set up a meeting and settle the dispute once and for all.
At the same time, a shaven–headed drifter, played by Lau Ching Wan, has arrived in the city, and begins doing strange things, obviously working for one side or the other, but which side is not at all clear.
Leung’s cop order’s the drifter out of town and, when he sees him again hours later, has him arrested. But then his superior (in the Triads, not the police) begins to suspect that he has sold out to the other side. There is evidence for it, too: a headless corpse turns up in Leung’s apartment, a major Triad figure has gone missing, and there’s a pile of money stashed in a satchel under Leung’s desk.
All of this has the makings for an interesting thriller, but I hated it. It commits the worst sin a movie can: it gives me no reason to give a single goddamn what happens to any of the characters. Leung’s cop is a brutal, repulsive thug who tortures more than one person, and orders the death by torture of another to coerce a confession. His viciousness is not candy–coated or veiled in any way. Yet he’s the protagonist.
In a sense, this is a good thing, insofar as it works directly the glamorous gangster image common in many HK—and American!—films. But it prevents you from giving a damn what happens to him, too.
Lau Ching Wan’s character is a cipher through most of the film, albeit a viciously brutal one. Once his motivations are revealed, he cannot be said to be any better or more interesting than anyone else in the movie.
Now all of this might be taken as a good thing: at last, a gangster movie that does not glamorize gansters in any way. A truly realistic gangster film!
If that is what you are thinking, okay, I will grant it you—but only to the halfway mark.
Once the drifter’s motivations start coming to light, and the chess game that one of the background characters is playing begins to be revealed, the plot descends into screaming lunacy. The most contrived, coincidence–dependent, Rube Goldberg scheme goes off without a hitch, and then…
Well, the movie tried extra–special–hard to be realistic, then it became ludicrously over–plotted, and it climaxes with a sequence that is almost surreal in its badness. It is perhaps two steps shy of the outrageousness of John Woo’s Face–Off, except that Woo wasn’t trying to be in any way realistic in that film, not at any point.
The finale does nothing to save it.
Now I don’t want to give a wrong impression. There is some good in the film in a technical sense. Tony Leung and Lau Ching Wan are two of Hong Kong’s finest actors, and both acquit themselves well here. The cinematography is excellent, as is standard in To–produced films these days, and Yau makes some interesting choices in small details in his direction. But overall?
Overall it’s a stinker.