Movie Review: Cold War/寒戰

 Given the tag line, you might think it was calledCold Sore …

Let’s face it, I’ve had a hard time watching local movies lately. I don’t mean it’s been difficult to watch them, I mean it’s been difficult to make myself go and see them, and by and large I have given up. I don’t feel bad about it, either. I just don’t have any interest any more.

But  someone gave me a free ticket to see Cold War/寒戰, so I went.

It’s a story about the kidnapping of a van full of police officers and the efforts to rescue them.

 死鬼佬…

It’s also about the personal, political, and powers struggles that take place in and around those efforts.  

There can be only one…char siu faan .  Someone’s gotta eat the congee. 

I was recently saying to a friend that in the current era of force-fed pop stardom, some of the best acting in local films is to be found on the second tier; often the supporting actors turn in the best performances.

That’s certainly true here; Gordon Lam and Chin Kar Lok are their usual dependable selves.

Arranged in descending order of acting quality.

On the other hand, the cameos tend to derail the film rather bluntly; Andy Lau has Robert DeNiro Disease, which means that he plays Andy Lau rather than his character, and Michael Wong’s appearance provided an unnecessary and incongruous outburst of laughter in the cinema I was in.

“I meant to do that.”

Aaron Kwok is apparently suffering from a terminal disease, such that he wants to do as much acting as he can in the few films he apparently has left.

Director Sunny Luk almost keeps him in check, but more often than not, Aaron tends to operate under the assumption that everybody wants more and bigger Kwok.

This could be either Andy Lau or Aaron Kwok, don’tcha think?

The younger stars in the film, namely Aarif Rahman as an ICAC officer and Eddie Peng as a young cop, are way out of their league in the acting arena.

This is not the face of intimidation. Or of someone who shaves daily.

Maybe I’m just too old, but seeing Aarif attempt to act as some kind of hard-nosed badass was simply amusing, and Eddie Peng was more like an errant, annoying child than anything approaching an adult.  

Look, he’s wearing pajamas.

It probably doesn’t help that the scrīpt is grossly convoluted, confusing, and obviously not well thought-out.

It suffers the usual problem of only having been conceptualized through the 2nd act, and after that the mad scramble and slapdash injection of implausible events to try and tie up all the messy ends takes place.

But there is a very good reason to watch the film nevertheless.

Tony Leung Kar Fai is great. His role is the centerpiece of the film, and I came away from it very impressed with his acting.

Big Tony, bitches.

He plays a senior police officer with decades of field experience whose son is one of the kidnapped officers.

Leung’s acting is forceful but not overbearing (unlike his opposite in the film), and he is at times funny, cynical, paternal, and honest, and manages to convince at all times.

His acting is reason enough to watch this film.

There is another reason, and while it is more implicit than explicit, it deserves mention.  

Is it finding out why these fingers are important? 

A big part of my divorce from local film has to do with its (understandable) pandering to the Big Red Market ‘up above.’

I’m sure that you can still make entertaining movies with no ghosts, no gambling, no sex, no profanity, no vampires, no bad cops, no good gangsters, and no moral cloudiness, it’s just that, well, no one seems to have done it much lately.

So it is interesting that a major premise which actually gets name-checked in a voiceover in Cold War/寒戰 is the idea of  the absolute necessity and virtue of transparent power and the rule of law.

Both of these are ostensibly part of the Constitution in the PRC, but neither one gets much use in real life. 

I guess it would therefore be interesting to see the Mainland cut of the film and see if this idea is left in or ‘lip raped’ out in the ADR booth.

 

But it would be a lot more interesting if this turned into a rap video.