Oh God, one of the toughest movies I’ve ever watched. Such a sad finale, too. Very well done, well acted, well scripted, good enough, a good movie, but so so hard, bitter, though. It’s a good versus evil story, but in a police-action with the cops looking for a paid assassin the only evil appears to be in the little pathetic bullies, ready to gang up in numbers against a single man or against girls. The cops are Milo (Alex Fong), the leader, a good man who knows how big a thing it is to shoot someone. He did once, and can’t forget it, but at the end is able to shoot Laifu (Daniel Wu) to protect one of his men. Brandon (Kar Lok Chin) is his second, a man who understands him very well. Among the others there’s a young cop, new to the group, who thinks that it’s not a bad thing to shoot the bad guys, on the contrary he’s all for it, and during a raid when they enter a room, he shoots a man in the head as soon as he sees him. The man was not armed, but Milo and Brandon work immediately to make it look like the action was justified, and Milo tells him “we are not protecting you, but your family and the team”.
I could almost say that fate is the big bastard in the movie, playing with their lives. In this specific case, Fate helps the cops, because that big trouble turns out to be a big success when they uncover a huge amount of drugs. It’s a big scene when Milo is alone with the young cop and puts his hand in front of a car’s red light so that his hand appears all red, and he tells him ‘we are alike’.
On the other side there is the assassin, who is actually a young man who has never before killed anyone, and who came from China to Mongkok to find a girl he loved. He helps Dandan (Cecilia Cheung) against a bully, then he runs away with her to avoid the consequences of his act.
They help each other: she shows him the way, he buys her a gold necklace and runs after a thief who had taken her bag. Left alone with his bag, she looks inside, can’t resist the temptation to take a bit of money, but is afraid when she sees the gun. She goes back to him anyway, and they try to find his girl. She makes him abandon the”assassin” thing, stopping him when she sees he’s strangling a man who had double-crossed him. That scene was intense. The man at first begged him not to kill him, but after he stopped, listening to Dandan, Laifu told him he would talk, put word around of what he did, so that his family would be in danger, and he has a big family, and now the man is all “kill me , don’t say anything please” but Laifu went away and the man walked on the road crying, and crying for him not to say anything, afraid for his family, to the only people who could hear him: the cops that were there for Laifu but could not get him.
Laifu and Dandan go back to her room to get her things and rest, then he goes out to get a medicine for her (poor girl is on her period, apparently) and as she asked he threw his gun into a bin. He comes back with a newspaper with his girl’s picture on it: it says she’s had a bad accident, and he’s so desperate he doesn’t notice when the bully silently enters with some bully friends: they badly beat him then the bully number one rapes Dandan, and then the shits go away. Dandan had cried while they were beating him, and now she’s all worried for him because he’s all covered in blood, his face is all red. He stands up and in the bad shape that he is, he still goes out, finds back his gun and wants to kill those guys. He can only hurt one because the cops are near and the young cop runs towards him. He can barely see through all the blood in his face and eyes, and shoots this guy that is running towards him. The young cop dies, and Milo and another one runs after him, and this is when Milo has to kill him. Another great moment: the young cop has his hand taken by a cop friend, and he’ll die in the hospital. Laifu held out his hand too, and Milo made the attempt of taking it! He had just seen him shoot a cop and almost shooting another, and yet his soul was leading him to take this dying man’s hand, only he didn’t make it in time and Laifu died there, alone. I don’t know what happened to the bully-gang, but I hoped they were thrown in a cell to rot. Honestly I doubt it, because the cops know nothing of what they did, Laifu can’t tell them and Dandan is not there at the moment. You see? The only ones that deserved to be skinned alive have no consequences, are all safe and sound. How unfair, isn’t it?
The movie ends with Dandan leaving Mongkok never to return again. She looks in her bag and she sees Laifu had given her the rest of his money. He had seen that she had taken some, but instead of getting angry he had understood and had given her more. She cries and asks why is it that it is called Hong Kong, something like the Door of the Fragrance, or something like that, I don’t remember exactly, but she says it while crying, meaning that it has a beautiful name but then horribly, desperate things happen. The movie ends there, with written on screen that the name was given to it because it was the place that produced incense, so Hong Kong means incense door. Interesting.
It was a good film, but personally I don’t want to see it again, it was too cruel for me. Still, it’s not so often I have so many good things to say and nothing against it. The final scene with Dandan’s question was a great finale, and a touching one. Milo had all the great moments I said above, and more. The little smile Laifu made when Dandan asked him to lose the gun passed almost unnoticed at the moment, but the memory of it will break my heart in a bunch of minutes, when all hopes are shattered. Laifu was not one of the good guys like Milo, but was not at all evil, like the bullies. He had had a difficult life, and now he had a difficult death. I guess fate was grinning, at the end.
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