Infernal Affairs is a Hong Kong film about cops and crooks, set in modern Hong Kong. Each side has infiltrated the other, and crime continues as undercover operatives report back to their bosses, and side tries to hunt down the moles within their organization. The film has a great concept and some good performances, but the plot doesn't build on the set up, and the film has a very slow opening and uneven pacing throughout.
Incidentally, the DVD cover is completely misleading. I'm not even sure who that woman is, but no female ever appears in the film dressed anything like, and no woman ever handles a weapon at all. Lies!
To the scores, which are
explained here.
Infernal Affairs, AKA Mou Gaan Dou, 2002
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 4
Humor: 3
Eye Candy: 5
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 5
Overall: 5.5
This piece of Hong Kong cinema has a very high reputation among movie buffs, and after hearing good things about it for years, we thought it would be worth $7 as a used DVD. It wasn't bad, but neither Malaya or me thought it was an especially good film. It's not bad, and the plot/concept is great, but the performances weren't that great, and the screenplay didn't live up to the story's potential. We might be alone in our indifference, since the film's got
a stellar 8.0/10 rating from iMDB users, but we calls 'em like we sees 'em.
The set up is the best part. Ten years before, a Hong Kong gang took six of their newest members and sent them off to the police academy, to become cops and work their way up through the ranks, all while reporting back to the crime syndicate. Simultaneously, the police are trying to penetrate the triads with undercover officers, and eventually each side has one high-ranking mole sabotaging investigations and drug smuggling operations. The police chief and the crime boss both know they have a mole, and both spend much of the movie trying to find out who it is, while placing most of their trust in... the moles themselves.
Loyalties become compromised over time, as each guy makes friends and forms relationships based on lies and deception, and the viewer is left to wonder if the cop will come back to law and order, and if the gangster has grown tired of his double life and resentful of his violent and crazy mob boss.
That's the theory, anyway. In actuality the cop was clearly a good guy and sick of being undercover as a criminal, and the criminal had a nice girlfriend and respected the police chief, and was clearly having second thoughts about helping the gang. The gang leader wasn't a bad guy either, making him understandable and almost reasonable, and the only crime shown was some drug smuggling, so the gang didn't really seem all that bad, and the gangster pretending to be a cop was doing nothing more than a sort of hi-tech espionage.
The film needed more juice; the gangsters should have been portrayed as more evil and crazy, especially the boss, and the undercover cop should have had to compromise himself more to maintain cover. They should have made him watch rapes, or made him beat someone to death. At the same time, the undercover mob guy seemed like the best, most noble cop in the film. Always full of misgivings, and with his gangster allies doing nothing but selling drugs, it wasn't like he was directly causing murders or child slavery or anything morally-damning.
I actually had trouble caring who was doing what for a while, with all the war room scenes of cops trying to bust heroin shipments, and moles undercutting their efforts. My complete personal ambivalence over the pointless war on drugs came in there, and as with drug busts in the US, I was like, "Who cares? It's not like 10 more boats aren't coming in with more heroin tomorrow night." As long as it's illegal and there's a demand, there will be smugglers getting rich off of it, and tax dollars being wasted trying to stop it.
Eventually the plot started kicking in some nice plot twists, as other characters turned out to be more or less than what they seemed, and there was a decent face off at the end. The conclusion felt rushed, though, and we didn't really care who won or lost in the end, since we had no one to root for or against. The fact that there's an alternate ending with a totally different conclusion, and that we had no real preference for either version, pretty well sums up our interest in this well-made but uninvolving film.
Our other problem, and I hope it doesn't sound racist, but we couldn't tell the actors apart for the first half hour. Everyone in the film is a young male, everyone's Chinese, everyone's got short black hair and no facial hair, everyone's in uniform, all their voices sound the same speaking a foreign language, subtitles don't have character name tags, and there are about 10 speaking roles all moving quickly. Eventually we caught on once the film moved forward in time and the undercover cop had facial hair, but the first portion of the film was a long sequence of, "Which guy was that? Is he the cop or one of the gangsters?"
While I can't really recommend this movie, I did enjoy the concept enough to get interested in the American remake. It's called
The Departed, and it's coming out October 6, 2006, with an all star cast. Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon are the four leads, though I don't know which are the cops and which are the crooks. I usually have no interest in US remakes of foreign films, but in this case I'm curious, since the concept of Infernal Affairs was solid; it just lacked on suspenseful execution, meaningful character development, and sufficient plot twists. Can the US script improve on the grit and conflict, and change enough details to make it suspenseful for people who have seen the original? Can Martin Scorsese amp up the tension and keep the film's flow more even? I guess we'll find out.
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