To live/die in Mongkok

Few memories remain of To Live and Die in Mongkok. Sadly, that's often the problem with Hong Kong movies. At the time of watching them, one admires the technical excellence of the production. Every aspect, except a few crucial ones, will be more than competent. Rarely are there reasons to pooh-pooh the editing, cinematography, lighting, costumes, make-up, music, or even the acting (unless market considerations required that lead roles were assigned to talent-challenged TVB contract artists, that season's over-hyped pop vocalists, or miscast Taiwanese and mainland starlets). Too soon after, the shallowness and/or incredibility of the plotline and script provide the overwhelming recollections.

The writer-director of this Hong Kong thriller was Wong Jing, who gave himself a brief cameo role in his tale of a triad gang's internal politics and warfare. Nick Cheung starred as the anti-heroic central figure with a huge psychological problem (a frequent problem for triad characters). He's a schizoid. He's released from prison after serving a long sentence for mass, hit-man-ly slaughter in Mongkok, usually accompanied by his Imaginary Friend, who is himself when he was a young killer. Naturally, nobody else can see the IF, but he's the one who goes ballistic when the ex-con seems to do so. So that means our anti-hero can, conveniently, still be seen as a nice guy.

His younger self had been captured because a trainee policeman had shot him in the back, and the policeman is now a detective stationed in the same district. No surprise there, or in him also having personality flaws. The ex-con's childhood pal, who's suffering from a wilder variety of evil complexes, is nastier than anyone else in the manor, even the university-educated rival attempting to grab the triad leadership. The gang's old-timers want to keep their power, but why any of them would back their dead leader's maladjusted son's claim would be puzzling to anyone who hasn't heard of North Korea.

Meanwhile, in order to introduce female interest to the plotline, there's a heart-of-gold prostitute (the only type allowed to be seen in Hong Kong movies) from the mainland, with a retarded young sister who's just been abducted. The anti-hero must save them and their nice middle-aged pimp. But can he save himself from his belief that Mongkok is a cage from which he can never escape? The script shows us the anti-hero seeing that image quite a few times, to be sure that we get the melodramatic point.

There's a bunch of potentially interesting secondary characters, especially the Imaginary Friend who cannot believe what's happened to his old Mongkok haunts, but the movie depends crucially on the confused character of the anti-hero. He was an ambitious dramatic device, but lacks a script that would allow a viewer to sense why a nerdish middle-aged ex-con would be a revered icon in modern Mongkok. Nick Cheung stares distractedly, mutters politely and is a total gentleman in a prostitute's bedroom. He clearly could never survive in Mongkok, and why should we care?