The Infernal Affairs!

After many years, the Hong Kong Movie review is back. I couldn't find the one I did on the Tokyo Raiders, so I forgot if I had another name for this. Tonight's movie is the Infernal Affairs starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (Hero) and Andy Lau (House of Flying Daggers.) Tony's charater, Yan, is the righthand man of Sam, and underworld drug boss. Andy plays Inspector Lau, who works in a unit that is investigating Sam. However, Yan is really an undercover agent for the police and Lau is a mole planted by Sam to be his eyes and ears in the police. Yan and Lau play a cat and mouse game, with each person being a cat and mouse simultaneously. Kelly Chen plays a minor role in the film and gets all of five minutes of total screen time. That's a damn shame since Kelly is a Chinese goddess.

Anyway, each side discovers the other planted a mole with their organizations and and both turn inwards to try and discover who are the moles, but the police make a critical mistake by placing Lau in charge of that investigation.

The movie is quite good, although it wasn't the usual Hong Kong fair I was expecting. I went into the movie thinking I was going to see these two duke it out with both guns blazing, but there was only one shootout towards the end of the movie and a stand off at the end. Not to say that's a bad thing. I like the direction they took with the movie. Some scenes didn't fit though, so there's a mark against the movie. Also, there was some woman and her daughter that showed up in the latter half of the film that made no sense whatsoever, especially since she knew Yan. She showed up again at the end of the film, and it's never really known what kind of relationship she had with Yan. Is he the father of her daughter, maybe? Anyway, they really could have cut her out of the movie without anyone noticing.

I'm really starting to like Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as an actor. He impressed me in Hero and he impressed me here. Andy Lau, on the other hand, is hard to like. It's not that his acting is bad or anything, but I've only seen him in this movie and House of Flying Daggers (as far as I can remember) and he's played antagonists that were hard to like and you wanted to see them fall and suffer. I really need to see him in a movie where he plays a face. Anyway, this is a solid movie through and through. On my scale of blah -> decent -> enjoyable -> HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AWESOME, I give the Infernal Affairs a rating of enjoyable.