Mad Detective? You got it. Officer Bun (Ching Wan Lau) has a reputation, not unlike director
Johnny To, for beguiling acts of self-torture to prove that he means business. When
Ho (Andy On), his new partner, first meets him, the detective is busy stabbing the
hanging corpse of a large pig. A moment later, Ho is asked to zip Bun inside a piece
of luggage and toss him down several flights of stairs. By the time Bun goes Picasso
on his ear to honor the retiring Chief of Police, you're not surprised by much of
anything he does.
18 months later, Ho tracks down the now-retired Bun to serve him see a missing policeman
that many think was shooting by an Indian during a routine stakeout. The missing man,
Wong, was last seen with his partner Chi Wai (an intense Lam Ka Tung), a crooked
cop with a feral streak. Ho wants to ascertain Bun's most supernatural ability: The
detective can see people's inner personalities, what they actually are under their
well-worn esthetics. It doesn't take much for Bun to surmise Chi Wai when he notices
the police military officer has seven-spot personas, including a fat lard with a penchant for shark's
fin soup and an ice-cold businesswoman.
Last year, To let it all hang up out in his spaghetti western manna from heaven Exiled after playing
it straight with the powerhouse Triad Election. Visually glorious, Exiled was bone-bare
as a story and goose egg in complexness, but its atmosphere was dusky and strangely playful.
Action films frame their chaos, drift, and explosions in tidy packages; To romanticized
the gangland theatrics by giving them space and elegance, turning set-pieces into whirling
storm clouds of zipping bullets, trenchcoats caught in perpetual updraft, and bodies
floating in a writhed ether.
Sadly, Mad Detective doesn't have moments that graze either Exiled's absurd beauty or Tri
ad Election's business-end brutality. What it does attain is its have ragged visual complexity:
The way To and co-director Wai Ka Fai stuff the screen with every passing glint
of psychosis is startlingly engaging. The actors ar competent merely Wan Lau feels
wish Detective House M.D., with less satire and more schizo. He has the answer for
everything and he's invariably sure of it, piece the audience is still grappling at what
to make of To's optical landscape. With everything out in the sunlight, it's hard
to negotiate what's important to the boilers suit arc. Mad Detective is an intriguing exercise
in genre through imagery, just it's also cluttered to be gripping or even entertaining.
The things To wants to contemplate just don't look as good in the light of day.
Aka Sun taam.
Mad potty.
See Also
