A police captain assigns his unit to help a colleague retrieve his gun, lost in an altercation with a street-gang, before a reporting deadline expires.
Just as much as the style and the look, it's the choreography and orchestration - and the way To shuffles the characters and objects about on his late-night chessboard; and the sound-scapes, in addition to the glorious night-lit streets and skyline which delight almost to the extent that the opening restaurant confrontational, ultimately tragic, musical chairs and climactic set-piece shoot-out serve as mere book-ends for what comes between. Or even, as brief irritants.
The characters don't particularly matter either - although there are some particularly wonderful-looking villains - because they're all just pawns for this visual, and aural feast.
You've seen plenty of tyre-squealer car-chases - maybe you've seen too many of them; To's come up with a new angle: the cars that glide at intervals through city streets, unobtrusively, apparently disinterestedly, and almost noiselessly - perhaps just to get you thinking "now I wonder what they're up to'? A crime film where all the cars keep within the speed limit? Shurely shome mishtake?
And then there's the kid on the bicycle: by the time of his third sighting you're wondering is he a midget gang member, or undercover cop - or afterhours drugs mule, even; and will it be his fate to be ripped apart with bullets, by all sides? How cruel could that be, for somebody so young? It's all about building tension, and keeping you on edge - or maybe filling in the spaces on that chessboard.
There are some great scenes and ideas, too - of course: as with that opening restaurant scene where various customers get re-assigned according to their place in the hierarchy, and phone messages that we only later become privy to, have fatal consequences. Then there's the tense confrontational scene in the video-game arcade, with the array of flashing video screens vieing for our attention with a synchronised symphony of unanswered cell-phones; and there's the men in cages, bent over almost triple.
Thematically, it reminds me of Kurosawa's 'Stray Dog' - and there may have been more than one scene of that classic referenced; visually; and to a certain extent narrative-wise, it reminded me of Scorsese's 'After Hours'. The boy on the bicycle reminded me of the boy in 'The Third Man', and also of 'M'. But these were only in passing: To obviously has his influences, but his style is all his own. And, sometimes, style matters.
