Detective vs. Sleuths

The movie sucks, and the characters talk and act like fools.

"We don't want to hurt anybody, we're just here for revenge!" What kind of criminals speak like that to calm the crowd? Maybe he should explain well on how he would like to do the revenge, by serving the enemy a massage maybe?

The movie is full of awkward paradox likewise in talks and actions, on every character, which distracts you from the story itself and make you curse.

The movie makers need to know a simple affair, that if you want to tell a detective story, just don't make it a story of idiots.

The rhythm of the story telling is chaotic too.

And the mixture of Beijing accent against mandarin amongst the actors of Hongkong and mainland makes no sense even in nowadays.

Instead of saying this is a detective story, it would rather be described as a creepy nonsense and full of shet talk.

The story writer focus too much on shaping a physical mad detective but completely ignore the basic reality of crime fiction presentations. For example, you would ask me to believe an female police officer would perform her job in crime scene where she have to chase, gun fight and building climbing when she is nearly at a stage of a childbirth? And you expect me to believe that Li Jun could be allowed to engage official crime investigation when he suffer severe mental health problem and risk all citizens and officers in life danger? Such nonsense just appeared all over the screen time and made people literally wonder what's going on with this movie.

Most of the character's motivations are simple, easy-predicated and some even ridiculous, which made people more easily to find that how unbelievable flat the character is. This is the kind of the story that you whish you never heard of. This is so....exhausted to watch. Once again, a new tip for myself: DO get out of it even in the middle of screening, when you find something funny is in the film. Instead of a crime fiction that you can enjoy, its more like those ridiculous Late talk show meme for spoof.

When I stumbled upon the 2022 Hong Kong crime mystery "San Taam Daai Zin" (aka "Detective vs Sleuths"), I had to sit down and watch it.

First of all, it was a Hong Kong movie that I hadn't already seen, and that in itself is more than sufficient to make me watch it. But the movie also has Ching Wan Lau and Charlene Choi on the cast list and they usually tend to make okay movies.

However, the storyline in "San Taam Daai Zin", as written by Lu Jia, Li Jie, Ka-Fai Wai and Yibing Wang, was a swing and a miss for me. The storyline was incredibly cluttered and made for a very confusing viewing. Whatever was going on in the movie just wasn't properly introduced or described to the audience, and as such I felt like I was sitting in darkness trying to make sense of the barrage of events, killings and characters that came rushing at me on the screen.

For a crime mystery, then director Ka-Fai Wai just went a bit overboard in terms of setting out to accomplish way too much with the storyline.

The acting performances in the movie were good, and especially Ching Wan Lau portrayed the disturbed Lee Chun character quite well.

Lots of nice locations throughout the course of the movie, and there was a nice dynamic feel to the movie and the way it was filmed, and that at least helped make the movie somewhat more watchable.

This is not a shining gem in the Hong Kong cinema, and it is definitely not a movie that I would recommend fans of the Hong Kong cinema to rush out and get to watch. In fact, this movie is one that I will never return to watch a second time. There are indeed far better crime mysteries in the Hong Kong cinema, if that particular genre is what you enjoy.

My rating of "San Taam Daai Zin" lands on a very generous four out of ten stars.

Detective vs. Sleuths, written and directed by Wai Kai Fai, is essentially a Milkyway film produced through the China-Hong Kong co-production machine. It is a bigger-budgeted, louder and dumbed-down police actioner that's constantly speeding to the next scene. Sean Lau is as always an engaging lead but is unfortunately sidelined as a cog in a larger formulaic machine.

As a string of brutal killings storms Hong Kong, Jun Lee, once a brilliant detective in the police force who was let go after a mental breakdown, conducts his own investigation the victims are all connected to his past cases. Yee Chan, a police detective who was a victim of one of the past cases, enlists Lee Jun's help to find the killer.

Sean Lau Ching Wan is easily the best part of the film. He plays a rehashed version of his lead role in The Mad Detective as a cop who solves crimes with supernatural abilities, which Lau improves upon by acting out the ghosts that converse with him. It's entertaining watching Lau's rapidly changing facial expressions talking to himself.

Charlene Choi tries her best but is unconvincing as a distinguished police detective. She overplays her character's vulnerability, looking like she's constantly on the verge of tears and not communicating an investigative mind solving the case at hand. On top of that, her character is pregnant and questionably partaking in dangerous action head-on. It is not more ridiculous than say running from a dinosaur in high heels, but it lacked conviction. In an interview, Choi was asked about her role preparation and said she was only told what to do on the day and thus what we see is her genuine reaction to everything.

Carman Lee is wasted as the police madam explaining the plot to the audience. Based on acting chops alone, I could picture Carman Lee doing a better job as the female lead if this was made back in the day.

Who had the final say on Detective vs. Sleuths? I'll never know. It plays like a movie made by its money backers cashing in with established formulae, which outweighs the creative parts of the script.

Wai Ka Fai sets up the mystery in an interesting way, but he is completely uninterested in exploring his own high concept. The rapid-paced editing never gives a moment to breathe or contemplate the crime. Most of all, the film repeatedly drowns itself in long monotonous shootouts that lack weight or consequence. The "pew pew pew" way the guns were fired, the bullets may as well have been orange rubber darts.

What the film tries to sell as depth is ridiculous. What father lovingly teaches her daughter Friedrich Nietzsche quotes in German?

I would recommend rewatching Mad Detective instead.

In 2007, Ka-Fai Wai wrote and co-directed, along with his much more internationally-famous colleague Johnnie To, the absurd crime thriller "Mad Detective", one of my all-time favourite films.

Now, after a 13-year absence from directing, Ka-Fai Wai is back, this time without Johnnie To or To's production company Milky Way, but with a film that seems like a new riff on "Mad Detective", almost a sequel. Ching Lan Wau is back, playing again an insane detective with some apparently supernatural crime-solving abilities lying underneath his madness.

It might sound derivative of the former film, but Detective vs Sleuths has some new tricks up its sleeve, and it honestly feels extremely fresh. Its twisty plot comes together beautifully in the end, the action scenes are some of the best in recent memory, and Ching Lan Wau's performance is bloody brilliant. His antics are crowd-pleasingly hilarious, but it never undermines the film's commitment to its increasingly outrageous narrative.

This film feels like a throw-back, to a level of creativity in Asian cinema that was much more common in the 2000s than what we've seen in the last decade. Certainly, I enjoyed this more than anything Johnnie To has directed since "Mad Detective". That film inspired me to check out more of Johnnie To's work, but now I'm realizing that Ka-Fai Wai deserves equal attention, and I'm very glad he's back after such a long absence.