In
America, budding criminals are much better off if they are tried and convicted
as minors rather than adults. It is the exact opposite in Hong Kong. If this
sounds perverse to you, many surviving youthful offender would readily agree.
Their experiences with HK’s “short sharp shock” juvenile justice system are
dramatized in Wong Kwok-kuen’s expose-like narrative, With Prisoners (trailer here), which screens during the San Francisco
Film Society’s annual Hong Kong Cinema series.
Fan
is a self-described “thug,” who is cocky enough to lay a smack-down on an
off-duty cop during a fair and square bar fight. However, the abuse meted out
at the Sha Tsui Detention Center will break him in a matter of days. Having
survived one suicide attempt, Fan will knuckle down, becoming a model prisoner,
by following the advice of Sharpie, a veteran re-offender. The older “boy”
(prisoners as old as twenty-five are incarcerated at Sha Tsui) deliberately returned,
to avenge a friend’s murder, which the guards dressed up as a suicide.
Most
likely it was the work of the brutal senior guard Gwai, or one of his vicious
comrades. Only the idealistic Ho and world weary veteran officer (rarely seen
in the film) are beyond suspicion. Unfortunately, the soul-deadening violence
of Sha Tsui is poisoning Ho’s relationship with his wife Samantha, a former junkie,
whom he saved during his social-worker days.
There
is plenty of socially conscious muckraking in With Prisoners. Realism certainly was not a problem, given the
presence of many former inmates in the large supporting cast, including Mak Yee
Ma, making an extraordinary debut as Sharpie. However, Wong and co-writer Wong
Chi-bong include some more traditional crime drama elements to help pull
viewers through, mostly revolving around the death of Sharpie’s friend and his
subsequent pursuit of payback.
The
quietly incendiary Mak is a heck of a discovery in Prisoners, but up-and-coming Neo Yau Hawk-sau also stretches his
chops and range quite nicely as Fan. Kelvin Kwan’s is admirably earnest, but
nobody can withstand the withering voltage of Lee Kwok-Lun’s work as the casually
sadistic yet eerily charismatic Gwai. What makes it so scary and potent is the
apparent effortlessness of his cruelty and how little it seems to affect him.
It is a performance that ranks up with R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.
