When Martin Scorsese came out with The Departed, there was immediate “Oscar buzz”. This tale of a cop going undercover in a notorious gang while a member of said gang becomes a mole in the police force at the same time started a lot of talk that this may just be the one to finally win old Uncle Marty that little naked golden man he’s always wanted. With such an intriguing concept, it seemed like there were still a few good ideas left in Hollywood and hope for American cinema could once again flourish!... until you realized that the same movie was made 4 years earlier out in Hong Kong. Well, guess Hollywood really is the waffle iron with a phone attached that we all thought it to be.
In 1994, Hon Sam (Eric “Gen-X Cops” Tsang), overweight leader of the Hong Kong crime syndicate known as the Triad, gathers a number of new Triad recruits who have no criminal records and enrolls them in the Hong Kong police academy. One of the group, Lau Ming (Andy “House of Flying Daggers” Lau), not only makes it past basic training, but works his two-faced ass (one for each cheek) off to become one of the department’s most respected Inspectors! This put him in the perfect position to help Boss Sam skirt the department’s intentions of justice and crap. Meanwhile, Chan Yan (Tony “Hero” Leung), who started in the exact same police academy class that accepted Lau, was immediately chosen by the force to be “expelled” from the academy and instead serve as their latest undercover piggy in the mean streets of Hong Kong, infiltrate the Triad, and help them take down the Saminator from the inside, all the while only answering to the head cop: Superintendent Wong. For 10 years these two build up the trust of their significant superiors and both get right up to the very top. Unfortunately for both, everything changes when one of Sammy’s drug deals goes sour and both he and Superintendent Wong start to believe there are moles in their individual fields, digging holes and ruining their damn carrot crops! As such, each picks a member of their teams (of course it turns out to be Lau for SI Wong and Chan for Hon Sam) and the rest of the movie becomes a series of close calls and revelations as Lau and Chan gradually work their way toward blowing each others’ cover.
Movies are never suspenseful for me. I’m never the type to sit there on the edge of my seat and do the comical “chewing off of the fingernails until I’ve eventually eaten my entire hand” shpiel. When I saw Jurassic Park Park with my family, everybody was jumping and freaking out while I just kinda sat there, embarrassed to watch movies in public with these people. Halloween never worked for me as well as it seemed to for everybody else for the same reason. Movies based on keeping the viewer on their toes just wind up wasting 90 minutes of my time that I could be using to, well, sleep or fuck or, I don’t know, work on this damn website. You can imagine my surprise (and that of my Evil Dead Bride as well) when I found myself actually getting giddy while watching Infernal Affairs, wondering what was going to happen next, who was going to be revealed as who, who was going to die or be found out and how it was all going to end! If I only had the strength to type out a two word review for this movie, it’d be “FUCKING AWESOME”.
Amazingly well written, incredibly acted, genuinely suspenseful and hits you with a final 10 minutes that have more twists than come out of an Aunt Annie’s store on Saturday. Don’t start to groan at that last comment though, because unlike a lot of movies (say The Bone Collector or The Prestige…) who just throw the twists at you for the sake of making you turn your head like a confused mongrel and bare your best “duh?!” face, this is a case where the twists are believable, they’re planned, they have merit and therefore they work. Instead of them being “What the fuck?!” moments, they’re “Holy shit!” ones.
I just finished watching The Departed before doing this review, so here’s how I feel they stack up: The Departed is over-hyped, I think the nomination for DiCraprio is a complete smoke job, I think it’s bullshit that Nicholson didn’t get a nod instead and if Scorsese wins the statue, it’ll be a pity award for not giving it to him for Goodfellas like they were fucking supposed to. Infernal Affairs is the better movie. It runs a little over an hour and a half and it does everything it needs to do with tension, suspense, action, drama and the rest of those proverbial nine yards. The Departed, for whatever reason, decides to slow down the action and pad the running time with an hour’s worth of what amounts to needless nothing, succeeding only in killing the tension and excitement of it’s predecessor. If you’re wondering which to rent this weekend, to fuck with The Departed and get Infernal Affairs. And if your rental store doesn’t carry it? Throw a fit and start flinging your feces in the children’s section until someone goes out and gets you a fucking copy! Damn it, I’m so aggravated now I’m breaking out in hives and eyeballs. Could somebody get me a fork?!
