One Nite in Mongkok
Director: Derek Yee; Jamie Luk
Year: 2004
Rating: 8.0/9.0
This film hurt. Perhaps
a lot of that is what I brought to it though. These days it is impossible
to get away from the violence that seems to be seeping into every fabric
of our lives. Every day you read the paper and it is more of the same – terrorist
attacks killing innocent people who woke up that day with every expectation
of living through it, husbands killing their wives, mothers killing their
children, strangers killing strangers and a country invading another for
reasons that never existed and so many dead as a result. Isn’t it sad though
that we only talk about the thousand dead Americans and no one mentions the
thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqi civilians that we came to “save” as
if their lives don’t matter. Not in election time I guess. There is so much
anger in the world and the response inevitably seems to be violence to others.
It saddens me and I think it saddens the director of this film, Derek Yee.
Yee’s portrait of Hong Kong and humankind is touching but ultimately extraordinarily
pessimistic. A humane picture of desperate people looking for something good
in their lives to latch on to – love, community, friendship or simply getting
though the night – but they can’t escape the violence that crawls along the
city streets looking for victims. And the violence isn’t linear, but more
like atomic particles rushing by one another until they collide which sends
them into unexpected directions to crash into other particles and so on infinitely.
All this plays out on the densely packed streets of Mongkok as particles
try not to collide with one another, but inevitably do. This wasn’t a message
that I wanted to hear – I wanted them to come face to face with violence
and walk away – I wanted to see mercy – I wanted to see understanding – I
wanted to see hope – but Yee shows us very little of that as he seems to
be saying that at the beginning of the 21st century there is an ever diminishing
supply of this in the world.
There is a fight over turf as two sellers of fake Rolexes within different
gangs clash. It is not much of a fight – a few punches thrown but like a
small pebble tossed into a pond it creates waves that disturb everything
around it. Later that night a gang member comes across a member of the other
gang (Sam Lee) in a nightclub and smashes a bottle across his head. When
he drives away with a girl from the club who had broken up the confrontation,
Lee follows and inadvertently crashes into the car and kills him and the
girl is badly burnt. The dead gang member is the son of a triad head and
revenge is naturally his course as he puts a contract out on the head of
Lee’s gang (Henry Fong Ping). The contract is handled by a middleman (Lam
Suet) who brings in a Mainlander (Daniel Wu) for his first job as a hitman.
The police get word of all this happening and the squad leader (Alex Fong)
and his men (among them Chin Kar-lok, Ken Wong and Anson Leung) venture out
on the streets on Christmas Eve to stop the impending killing by either locking
up the two bosses or finding the hitman. Wu comes to Hong Kong and checks
into a rundown hotel where he intrudes upon a man beating up a Mainland prostitute
(Cecilia Cheung) and gives him a thrashing. Wu has more than a killing on
his agenda though, he has also come to look for his girl who came to Hong
Kong from their small village and who he has lost track of. He hires Cecilia
to help him find her. As the two go in search for her they soon realize that
the police are on their trail as Suet has been forced to give him up to them
and they are soon on the run. In their time together they show each other
small signs of kindness and mercy and a picture of hope begins to emerge
but Wu has a deadline approaching for him to kill someone and the police
are right behind them. It is a long night ahead of all these people and some
won’t make it to the morning.
Within the fairly conventional plot of a hitman, a prostitute and the cops
after them, Yee does wonders and never makes a false move until the end.
He takes all the various threads and the myriad of characters and ties them
into a seamless whole that is fascinating, slick and tensely paced. Though
the story jumps around from character to character, with small cinematic
brushes Yee paints their personalities quickly and makes them into real conflicted
people with depth – even for the minor characters. By the end of the night
you feel like these are real people that you care about – not stock characters
waiting to be written out of the script.
There is so much good that goes on here - the location shooting, the shadowy
atmosphere, the realistic mix of Mandarin and Cantonese, the acting (Wu doing
perhaps his best work yet), the camera work, the authentic feel of it all,
the small things like the reverberation of a gun or Fong quietly comforting
a rookie – but his final choices almost destroy the film for me on an emotional
level (though not my appreciation for it) as he falls back on the use of
some cinematic clichés and far too many co-incidences to bring about
his wanted ending. Even here though he does it powerfully, painfully – the
image of a bleeding hand reaching for one last moment of human contact before
death is gutwrenching and Yee reinforces his pessimism by having it fall
short.
My rating for this film: 8.0
Reviewed by Lee Alon
You can't keep a good city down, and with Derek
Yee's massively straight-faced nocturnal crime flick, this particular notion
makes itself once more apparent with regards to trusty old Hong Kong.
Seven Elevens bathed in fluorescents, sleazy cheapo
hotels, dark alleys, teeming shopping districts and rambunctious sidewalk
snack fests. Sure, all regulars in Johnnie To and Wong Kar Wai movies, but
it’s been sometime since we’ve seen them in a project so effortlessly evocative
of all the unique atmosphere HK has to offer, easily bringing back images
of the fragrant harbor's unbeatable charm. Plus, it comes in to salvage the
day exactly when we thought the cops-and-robbers genre took an unsolicited
sojourn somewhere up in the mountains. What a refreshing reprieve!
ONIMK sees two of HK's most promising (and by now established) thespians
give it their best. Daniel Wu enters the fray as Lai Fu, an almost mechanically
introspective no-name assassin hired by Mongkok triad operative Liu Ge (embodied
by reliable Lam Suet) as expeditor of certain underworld disagreements requiring
resolution. Armed with a gun, heaps of
money and stoic dispositions, Lai Fu begins prowling the vibrant borough's
streets, in search of his assigned target.
However, things change once he meets fellow mainlander Dan Dan, a decent
person eking a meager existence by prostituting herself to the pleasure of
dubious clients. Here, Cecilia Cheung simply shines as the female lead, apparently
well recovered from her back injury of two years ago, and definitely looking
her sexiest since 1999's memorable Fly Me to Polaris.
Lai Fu and Dan Dan hit it off following a customer-related incident in which
the former literally saves her ass, and proceed to trawl around the place,
with Lai Fu obviously not in his element, maybe due to Dan Dan's tagging
along and repeatedly benefiting from the young man's newly-acquired wad of
crisp bills. Realizing his former sweetheart got herself mangled in a gangland-related
car wreck (driven by Made in Hong Kong's Sam Lee) doesn't precisely help
his focus, either.
Matters take a different course when the story shifts to indulge in goings
on at a CID unit led by a veteran detective (done by Alex Fong). His mixed
team, comprising experienced officers as well as total novices, eventually
becomes embroiled in Lai Fu's fatal odyssey as they attempt to keep him from
carrying out his maligned mission. En route we take detours into several
semi-related nighttime antics, with the CID crew slowly getting closer to
ending Lai Fu and Dan Dan's haphazard escape. Not only do both plot lines
enjoy excellent scripting, they moreover showcase the film's enthralling
duality, as we track vagabonds and cops, each faction with its own internal
turmoil and background. Overall, ONIMK does very well in depicting protagonists,
and when the two threads finally converge, the movie delivers with considerable
impact.
Although everyone in the main cast contributes their fair share, kudos go
mostly to Daniel and Cecilia. Each has a concrete presence here, lending
characters believable, coherent personalities and instant viewer identification.
Wu's practically indestructible, inscrutable and at the same time, timid.
Cheung manages a versatile performance of laudable depth, concurrently lascivious,
honest and wittily funny. And Alex Fong's portrayal of the jaded yet humane
police lifer challenges preconceptions, putting a twist on this rather pigeon-holed
role.
But above all else, One Nite in Mongkok's an atmospheric ode to both genre
and locale. Its camera work exposes every environmental component with care,
granting equal import to the seedy, banal, titillating and tacky. Via such
ace cinematography and a moody soundtrack that sticks in the mind, this film
indeed makes one feel as if they are going through the night themselves,
the hours passing while Hong Kong celebrates an oddly disjointed Christmas
Eve, day turning into darkness.
Add masterful acting, and we have before us a tour de force combining the
gritty, hard hitting elegance of good crime movies with the stylish intelligence
of proper indie. Unarguably one of the best releases of 2004, and a title
sure to engage your DVD player for more than one night.
Rating: 9/10
Directed by Derek Yee
Starring Cecilia Cheung, Daniel Wu, Alex Fong, Lam
Suet, Anson Leung
2004, Putonghua/Cantonese, 110 minutes
Contact Lee Alon here
