Catching up… I shouldn’t have watched this within a couple weeks of Detective vs. Sleuths. Johnnie To may be retired but his particular way of lighting street scenes lives on – writer, editor, and DP are all from Drug War, Blind Detective, and Romancing in Thin Air.

Bo from Sparrow is a twitchy guy trying to help people change their fates. His latest client leaves and is immediately murdered, witnessed by a pervert delivery boy whose hobby is killing CG cats, always pursued by a mustache cop. According to fate, Bo will go insane and the delivery guy will do a murder, so they team up to change the future. Then a bad-luck prostitute moves into the apartment building, looking like an excellent victim to both the delivery boy and the real killer whose bag of knives keeps changing hands. My second HK movie lately with scenes in a morgue, as Bo tries some spirit-transfer business, but tragically he ends up becoming an MPD psycho and getting locked up, as the cop retires young and the delivery boy learns to be kind to CG animals.

Since I already watched one movie this week where Anya Taylor-Joy costars with a guy with multiple-personality delusions. Security supplies dude Bruce is joined by his son Joseph (Spencer Clark, same actor as in Unbreakable when he was 12! Now with black Hellraiser eyes). Bruce catches up with Horde who has kidnapped some cheerleaders, and the cops take them both to the same facility where Mr. Glass is being held.

Sarah Paulson (Fassbender’s slaveowner wife in 12 Years a Slave) is a phony-sounding psych specializing in delusions of grandeur, and will spend the rest of the movie trying to talk these men out of the idea that they’re heroes or villains, saying Bruce just has a brain cloud. This is the Glen or Glenda of superhero movies, overexplaining all its ideas – I flipped off the TV more often than I usually do. The movie ends with its own clip reel getting released as a viral video, thanks to some hacker code quickly written (complete with comments, lol) by Glass. It’s the super-serious parts of X-Men movies without the fun parts. At least I appreciate that M. Night ends the story on a note of needless police brutality.

“The broken are the more evolved.”

Three girls get kidnapped by Kraftwerk James McAvoy, who turns out to be one of many James McAvoys, collectively calling themselves The Horde. Light-haired Haley Lu Richardson (Columbus) wants to fight, dark-haired Jessica Sula (The Lovers) is freaking out, and Anya Taylor-Joy (The VVitch) had a hunter or survivalist father, stays cool and follows orders. Horde’s psychiatrist (Betty Buckley of Carrie, Frantic) seems to admire him, and knows more than she lets on. I had my doubts about watching a multiple-personality McAvoy thriller but M. Night knows how to put a movie together, and now that he’s lost The Visit handheld camera gimmick, this was a damned good time, with a hell of a surprise cameo at the end.

Fabulous action thriller, visually stylish with wild acting and a great, complicated script. According to Masters of Cinema it was the “year’s largest grossing film at the Hong Kong box office.” According to IMDB, it made nearly $5,000 at the U.S. box office. This is why a remake is inevitable (thanks to the producer of Rush Hour, can’t wait).

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Ho (Andy On of Black Mask 2 and New Police Story) is new on the police force, investigating the disappearance of another officer. Bun (Ching Wan Lau of Black Mask 1 and My Left Eye Sees Ghosts) is the unhinged “mad” detective, actually an ex-detective fired from the force for cutting his ear off but still an utter master of deduction through his unusual methods of instinctually empathizing with killers and victims. It’s part Training Day (crazy partner) and part Silence of the Lambs (dangerous non-cop assisting investigation), except that Bun is a good guy.

Bun visits a crime scene and imagines himself participating:
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In fact, he begins to emerge as the only good guy, as he gets deeper into the conspiracy (the disappeared cop was killed by his partner Chi Wai (Ka Tung Lam of Election 1 & 2), who is going on crime sprees with his murdered partner’s gun) and Ho reveals himself to be a useless coward. Bun claims to see people’s inner personalities (including “Fatso” and a strong violent dude, both Breaking News vets, and “the calculating woman” who makes all of Chi Wai’s decisions) – in the shot below, Chi Wai’s many personalities ride in the back seat while Ho appears as a scared little boy.

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So in the end it’s less Training Day meets Silence of the Lambs than MPD Psycho meets Herman’s Head. May (Kelly Lin of Boarding Gate) exists as two characters – she’s Bun’s tough ex-wife, an inspector on the force who warns Ho about his erratic behavior, and in Bun’s mind she’s still his loving wife, always by his side at home and at dinner parties with Ho and his worried girlfriend Gigi.

Inspector May:
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During the shootout finale in a hall of mirrors (of course there are mirrors), Ho becomes the new Chi Wai, displacing guns and covering up who shot whom to keep himself out of trouble, controlled by his brand-new commanding woman inner-personality, a terribly good, scary ending.

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Looked to me like To and his cinematographer were using whichever camera Mann shot Miami Vice with, but IMDB says it’s 35mm so I’m way off.

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AUGUST 2021: Watched again in HD, still great. Guess that English-language remake isn’t gonna happen.

APRIL 2024: And again with Maria, who said at least the first ten minutes was good before it went straight into the deep end.