Divide-and-conquer
and playing one opponent against another might sound like shrewd Art of War strategies, but they can land
you in the midst a crossfire. Frankly, there
is no safe place to be in Johnnie To’s Drug
War (trailer
here). The HK action auteur’s lean, mean return to
form screens today at the 2013 New York Asian Film Festival just ahead of its
July 26th New York opening, courtesy of Well Go USA, the intrepid
distributor getting a special shout-out at this year’s festival with their own special
programming spotlight.
“I’m
cop—I didn’t betray you, I busted you.”
Captain Zhang Lei’s choice words for the somewhat disappointed drug courier
he just collared will echo throughout To’s first gangster throwdown set and
co-produced in Mainland China. Zhang
also reeled in a bigger fish: Timmy Choi, a meth lab proprietor and trusted
liaison between various criminal factions.
Facing
the death penalty, Choi agrees to play ball with Zhang. He will introduce Zhang to Brother Haha, a
distribution kingpin looking for product and the representative of a shadowy
supply consortium. At each meeting,
Zhang pretends to be the opposite gangster, in hopes of taking down both
operations simultaneously. He is not
absolutely, positively sure he can trust Choi, but it is too good an
opportunity to pass up.
Unusually
gritty compared to the operatic Vengeance
and Exiled, the first two acts of
Drug War are essentially street-level
procedurals, but darn good ones. To
shows us the nuts and bolts of the Tianjin drug squad at work, as well as the
extreme lengths Zhang will go to take down his targets. However, when it is finally go time, Drug War erupts into cold, hard, violent
bedlam.
As
Zhang, Sun Honglei is the absolute essence of hard-nosed steeliness. Initially, it is rather jarring to hear him
giggling in the guise of Haha, put he pulls that off too. Likewise, Louis Koo will make viewers forget
all about his recent leading man rom-com roles in his coldest, weasliest
performance in years, even if he was dubbed for Mandarin speaking audiences. His Choi is truly a survivor, like a
cockroach.
To
fans will also being relieved to hear Lam Suet eventually turns up, as a
criminal mastermind, no less. Aside from
a bit of comic relief here and there, the soldier-like supporting cast sets the
right tone, particularly the glammed-down, nonsense Crystal Huang as Zhang’s
colleague, Yang Xiabei.
