Jin shou zhi

I watched Infernal Affairs when it first hit these shores, and really was engrossed in what was an incredible tour de force of a movie. This film reunites the two leads from that classic film in an attempt to reignite that spark, and personally I found it generally worked.

We have a reversal of roles, with Tony Leung playing the villain as againt Andy Lau playing the dedicated policeman. The storyline centres around the rise & fall of the a crooked developer during the growth & rise of Hong Kong through much of the 1970s onwards, all with the background of the story of Hong Kong behind it.

This film really does get so much correct, and matches Infernal Affairs in terms of acting, direction and pacing. I was engrossed in this film, and thoroughly enjoyed the storyline as we saw the ebbs & flows of the Tony Leung's crooked developer rise to the top, and all his amorality in everything he does. He plays everyone, not always winning, but comes out on top at the end. Andy Lau plays the cop dedicated over the decades and failing to bring down the crooks, with the case taking its total personally as much as professionally.

Despite the positive aspects, the problem is though that I think for what should be a more serious film, there were moments of ridiculous nonsense which were unnecessary and took away from the film, in its humour and at time comic representations of various people (especially of the foreigners in Hong Kong). Tony Leung is excellent, but at times it was hard to see how his character really was a genius or was he just lucky. It just seemed to not add up. That kind of took away from the film.

Regardless of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the film and look forward to watching it again. I was surprised by the negative reponse by some to this film which is a shame. Maybe this film is a throwback to an old era of Asian gangster movies, which I admit is one I truly love. In this day, this film seems like a relic, but I don't care, I still find there's a place for films like this.

Personally, it's the best new film I've watched for a long time, and much better than any new film I watched over the past year in particular. I just hope that this film will help to introduce a new audience to Asian gangster movies, which rely on character and storyline as against CGI & comic book heroes.

I really recommend this film, it's been wonderful to watch these two great actors again a film that matches their status.

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...

Wanted to see what grandpa Tony is up to these days. His most recent movies that I have seen are Hidden Blade and Shang-Chi. And he's looking very much like a grandpa on his socials, but they do some movie magic here cause he's perfectly refreshed. What I'm saying is I'm now attracted to grandpa Tony so there's that... He is really captivating here as the baddie, a very charismatic, chill dude, with plenty of hidden depths that are barely alluded to. He's always been good with that enigmatic smile of his.

Andy Lau and Tony Leung once again on opposite sides of the law, only here they switch places. So that was also exciting. They have plenty of scenes together but I wished for even more.

The first half hour is captivating enough but the following hour I admit I had to push through. There's a lot happening, a lot of characters and side plots and the execution is quite good overall, but I just wasn't that into it. The last half hour gets things back on track and got my attention again, exposing the scope of the scheme, the many ramifications and hidden figures and in the end the venality of the main orchestrator and it is a beautiful thing to uncover, I am just sorry about that middle part cause I don't know what happened there.

It's not Infernal Affairs and it's not Wolf of Wall Street but with this story it could've been and I don't know why it wasn't and I'm a little frustrated about it.

Also, I couldn't find a version in Cantonese so I couldn't relish Tony's voice and sometimes it's obvious that it's dubbed. I like Mandarin but I will always prefer the actors' voices.

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.