Goldfinger

There's a shot from the Goldfinger teaser that got me wildly excited: a close-up of Tony Leung biting a cigar smugly laughing with gold Mardi Gras raining down all around him.

Tony Leung's cheese-eating grin came across as an attempt at something new, different from the usual shy side smirk from his repertoire of introverted characters. Leung is creating a high-energy chaotic character, a performance we haven't seen yet.

In The Goldfinger, Tony Leung plays Henry Ching, a fictionalized version of real-life businessman and financial criminal George Tan who ran the Hong Kong conglomerate Carrian Group which collapsed from a corruption and fraud scandal in the 1980s.

Henry arrives under mysterious circumstances in Hong Kong in the 1970s, working his way up to founding the Carmen Group. The sudden collapse of a billion-dollar company due to a stock market crash draws the attention of ICAC prime investigator Lau Kai-yuen, who begins an investigation on Ching.

The Goldfinger is a disappointment. It pains to say...

Writer-director Felix Chong, one of the writers behind the Infernal Affairs trilogy, gets lost in an overbaked plot and delivers a flashy run-of-the-mill rise-to-fall crime thriller that sinfully misuses its two leads Tony Leung and Andy Lau.

Felix Chong gets caught up in window dressing the plot, using a non-linear structure of police interrogations conducted by Andy Lau's ICAC officer to fill in Henry Ching's past and set up the mystery behind Henry's secret money backer. It's a plot that Chong never gets the audience to care about.

The audience's priority is quite simple: to see Andy Lau and Tony Leung chewing scenery.

Infernal Affairs fans who are eagerly anticipating Tony Leung and Andy Lau's reunion will be let down. First off, Andy Lau is in a supporting role as the ICAC investigator. Secondly, Leung and Lau's scenes are procedural and plot-serving and lack the dramatic scene-chewing quality like the rooftop finale in Infernal Affairs.

As for Tony Leung's performance, it's an unsatisfying half-creation that lingers between the Tony Leung we're all familiar with and something brand new. The script positions Henry Ching as a mysterious cipher for so long that Leung never gets the screen time to properly develop his part.

Decked out in flashy expensive suits and tinted sunglasses, there are glimpses of the chaotic flamboyant Tony Leung that the trailer promised, but it's too few and far between, only appearing in montage moments-just enough to cut into a trailer!

What remains is Tony Leung's usual persona. As a result, the performance becomes an unfortunate case of the costume wearing the actor, like a cosplay.

Andy Lau is stuck in a bland stock hero role who's delivering exposition and driving the story, or rather investigation, forward. Lau is given a family subplot involving a disgruntled wife who's mad at him for neglecting his family for his job, but it goes nowhere.

It all fizzles out awkwardly at the end. As the end title cards are showing the fate of the characters, you realize the whole film is a string of historical facts.

I walked out of the theater bored and exhausted, contemplating how I got so excited over a trailer. Trailers lie. Lesson relearned.

Back in the 1970s, Hong Kong was riddled with corrupt officials that the Government determined to bring to book. Much to the chagrin of one of the principal culprits - the police - they established an anti-corruption unit charged with addressing this problem, and thanks to one of their lead investigators (Andy Lau) they succeed! Many years later, when the British and Chinese start to talk about the colony's reunification, the Stock Market plummets and he is brought back to investigate the wealthy boss of a large network of companies (Tony Leung) who is living his gilded life of luxury whilst his investors seem to be losing their shirts. As he looks into things more, he discovers an intricate web of subsidiaries, bribery and shell companies that prove to resemble the ultimate in ponzi schemes. It's not just the enterprise that is suspect, but he gradually realises that the dodgy establishment he had hoped he had helped to dismantle years earlier had just, very efficiently, reinvented itself - and it permeates through to the top echelons of society. The film is based on real events and so, like them, we have peaks and troughs as the plot develops. That's where the film rather loses it's way. At it's best, it's tightly structured with a good dynamic between the policeman and his prey. For most of the rest of it, it rather meanders along with a real paucity of detail and little effort to show us just how charisma and charm duped just about everyone. A decent effort from Lau and Leung but it's a long two hours that skimps too much on the interesting aspects of an business that spanned the world at it's peak, run by a sleazy and unscrupulous man.

Giving this an 8/10 rating

New crime thriller from the filmmakers of 'Infernal Affairs' which had Andy Lau in, and he's in this too, along with Tony Leung.

Tony Leung, plays an poor engineer who comes to Hong Kong seeking work and gets involved in wrong doing that escalates in him running a criminal empire of billions, Andy Lau, plays the police investigator who goes after him. It's all very complex and very tense.

It looks and feels of the era it's set in the 1980's and corruption is all over the place. Even the slow parts still engage and you see just how greedy people can really be. It's a lovely production and the acting is full on brilliant, which does make up for action, which there is some, it's not done with any glamour, it's done to shock. But it's really the two main leads who pull off the show, again. Another true story that I did not know about.

The last cooperation of Tony Leung and Andy Lau is "Infernal Affairs", which is over 20 years ago! The Goldfinger is a true scam adapted into a movie, which presents the 80s of Hong Kong perfectly! Before watching the movie, I have spent a great deal of time to conduct the research of the historical scam, as i think the mastermind of this case was so terrible and crazy! Undoubtedly, the movie show us that money is the chief of all evil and how did a largest business deception work superbly. Tony Leung exquisite acting skills lead audiences feel like engaging into the capital empire. I was so happy that he get the Best Actor in 42nd Hong Kong Film Award through this amazing movie!

Bond-adjacent title aside, The Goldfinger throws everything at the screen, including different film styles, stocks and interstitial musical montages, in the vain hope that kinetic energy might be mistaken for dramatic power. It's far from the reunion between Lau and Leung that fans of Hong Kong cinema have been waiting for, instead coming across as more of a hollow wet fart in this by-the-numbers, overcomplicated Wolf of Wall Street clone without any of the filmmaking confidence to pull it off successfully. It all feels like it's been run through a mainland China viewing board to become a curiously uninvolving work that takes what sounds like a potentially fascinating story and somehow manages to render it mostly inert due to a disappointingly shallow treatment. Lau and Leung are more than capable actors but with a standardised narrative that doesn't challenge them in any way, they ultimately sleepwalk their way through the film. Ultimately, The Goldfinger is a hard one to recommend, there's no fun to be had here, it's all brutally shallow and lacking in dexterity, only really worth something to those well-versed or interested in stock market manipulation. I'm sure there will be an inevitable sequel, presumably titled The Thunderball or The Goldeneye...