Breathlessly Waiting for the Laird's Review
As good as the Hong Kong version was, the Hollywood remake of "Infernal Affairs" (retitled "The Departed" for American audiences) has a shot at being a good movie. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio are on board. Scorsese is directing. Brad Pitt was going to act but it now looks like he is the producer...
posted by Anonymous at 8:42 PM
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Here is my review of Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao):
This movie made me look back at how much and how little Hong Kong gangster movies have changed in the 15 years since John Woo's The Killer first brought this genre to my (and many American's) attention. I remember leaving the theater in Seatle the first time I saw The Killer, when a fellow audience member quipped to his companion, "If I knew they were making this movie, I would have invested in lead futures." I'd never seen anything quite like, and I was thrilled that it took me someplace new. It not only had more stylized violence and more spent cartridges, it was my first look at a movie set in Hong Kong by somebody from Hong Kong. Also, it introduced us to one of the world's great movie stars, Chow Yun Fat. (There are far too many "movie stars" today, but precious few movie stars.)
John Woo was the great revolutionary of Hong Kong gangster movies (as Hark Tsui was the great revolutionary of Kung Fu movies around the same time). His magnum opus was 1992's Hard Boiled (which bears some great alternate English-language titles: God of Guns, Hot-Handed God of Cops, and Ruthless Super-Cop), his last movie in Hong Kong before emigrating to the U.S. to make mediocre action movies. (BTW: the Eurasian villain from Hard Boiled, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, plays Police Superintendent Wong in Infernal Affairs.)
What (you can probably guess) I'm leading up to is, "Andy Lau, you're no John Woo. Also, you are no Chow Yun Fat." Don't get me wrong; he's good, and Infernal Affairs is a good movie. He's made a very accomplished thriller, but broke no new ground, and had no surprises. When I looked at the cover of the Video CD (very kindly lent to me by Dr. X for like a year, it seems), I said to M., "Let me guess: one's a good cop, and one's a bad cop. Or, one's a cop, and one's a gangster. They are enemies, but they find respect for each other in the end." (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Okay, what I didn't guess was that one's a cop undercover as a gangster, and one's a gangster undercover as a cop, and that the symetry expands from there, and that this plot is new, if not entirely original (c.f. Woo's Face Off), and it is no surprise that out-of-new-ideas Hollywood is eager to do a remake.
Bottom line: good flick, worth watching, but don't expect the second coming. Also, you may get whistful for Hong Kong movies from the early 90's, like I did.
A slight disagreement with the Laird. "Infernal Affairs" doesn't give us stylistic breakthroughs or exotic plot elements but it does give us something that I haven't seen in many HK action movies (not that I've seen a lot of HK action movies): uniformly good acting. Chow Yun Fat is a movie star like Humphrey Bogart was, he plays himself in every movie and we love him for it. Andy Lau seems to me more like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, willing to lose himself in a role even if it isn't flattering to him. And that Anthony Wong Chau-Sang--yowsah!
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