Stool pigeon

Good car chases and shoot-outs. Swishing machetes and gory wounds. Psychologically damaged characters on either side of the law. Hong Kong action movies have been there and done that many times, and writer-director Dante Lam needed a fresh plot element in 2010. So he constructed a screenplay about police informants as unsung anti-heroes in The Stool Pigeon.

In a previous multi-award-winner, The Beast Stalker, Lam had worked with the same screenplay writer Jack Ng and lead actors Nick Cheung and Nicholas Tse. The plot for their reunion is different enough to interest audiences and not be too surprising.

Cheung is a police inspector and experienced user of paid informants. The script includes many references to the two-sided exploitation, starting with a lengthy opening scene showing how circumstances obliged Cheung to expose an informant to almost certain death. This serves a key marketing purpose of providing a hyper-ham role for one of Hong Kong's hammiest supporting actors, Liu (Kill Zone) Kai-chi. Saved from death by luck, he is later found, a mad beggar, hiding himself from his wife and child, befriended secretly by the policeman.

Cheung's newest spy is a petty criminal newly released from prison, shaven-headed Nicholas Tse, a road-racer Cheung hopes will be recruited by a long-wanted goldshop-robber, providing a dubbed role for the mainland's commanding Lu (Aftershock) Yi . Cheung helps his man gain acceptance, offering him the chance to pay off his father's million-dollar debt, thereby freeing his sister from a life of prostitution.

When Tse joins the gang, he discovers that he'd met the chief's girlfriend before (in a brilliantly-staged flashback using overhead cameras to show two people fleeing cops and robbers on roads that meet, enabling the pair to escape). Taiwanese Kwei (Ocean Heaven) Lun-mai delivers another bravado offbeat performance, and her character's decision to swap loyalties is made credible by her and the script. She'd also worked on The Beast Stalker.

Far less credible is the secondary female interest, presumably attached to the plot in order to employ a leading mainland actress, Miao Pu. Her thankless role, portrayed very touchingly, is that of the policeman's lame and amnesiac wife, who'd attempted suicide and now works as a receptionist at a dance school where her unrecognised husband visits her. That's bad enough as an irrelevant plot device. It gets worse when her father and brother attack the inspector.

Lam's speedy direction and good editing allow audiences to accelerate past such roadblocks, and admire a lot of strong details in the settings and characterisations. As in all Hong Kong movies co-produced with mainland companies, we know that justice will prevail, good sinners will redeem themselves while their bad kin will die deaths of a hundred cuts, no leading sinners will speak Mandarin, and baddies never use the mainland as their base. Dante Lam's skills ensure that such an obligatory fairy-tale framework stands up well in this above-average action-thriller.