Word: lau
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...hearing the setup of this crime-movie storyline has audiences jittery with anticipation. It's rare that a plot gets people into theaters, but this one already has, and will again. Four years ago it was the scenario for Infernal Affairs, a terrific Hong Kong movie directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, and written by Mak and Felix Chong, which became one of the all-time top grossers in the ex-colony. Now it has been remade by Martin Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan as The Departed. Chances are that, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the good cop, Matt Damon...
...Infernal Affairs - starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Hero, In the Mood for Love) as the good cop and longtime dreamboat Andy Lau as the mobster's mole - became its own cottage industry. It spawned a sequel (IA II), a prequel (IA III) and, in glorious Hong Kong fashion, at least two ripoffs (the burlesque Love Is a Many Stupid Thing and a femme version, Infernal Mission). Nominated for 16 HK Film Awards, IA won seven: for picture, director, script, lead actor (Leung), supporting actor (Anthony Wong as Leung's police boss), cinematography and editing...
...Casting Lau and Leung made for a superstar pairing equal, in Hong Kong, to DiCaprio and Damon - or, since the Hong Kong actors are about a decade older than the Americans, to Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Leung's persona, of restrained brooding and worldly-wise resignation, has won him five Hong Kong Film Awards as Best Actor, two more as Supporting Actor, as well as Cannes' actor prize for In the Mood. Lau, whose retinue of teen fans follows him everywhere (he's also the most successful Cantopop singer of his generation), has been a lucrative movie commodity...
...main roles would be catnip for any actor. The roles, after all, are about acting: the risk factors the men face, the bravado required, and the duplicity in their tasks, and thus their personalities, call for the subtlest pretense. And in IA, both actors met the challenge. Lau smartly inverted his famously ingratiating disposition, for in the movie he is fooling everyone but himself, his mob patron - and the audience. While the Leung character gets to agitate privately about his isolation as an undercover agent, the Lau character never agonizes over the lie that is his life. Inside...
...limited run in the U.S. two years ago (it's available on DVD), and what people remember from it, besides the tightening stress as the antagonists search for each other, are some cool set pieces: the 20min. scene of a drug deal monitored by the cops, as Lau and Leung try to get messages to their contacts without being caught; a couple of tense rooftop meetings that end in death; Leung's pursuit of Lau outside a movie theater; and the moment when a taxicab is abruptly flattened, out of the sky, by the falling body...