This movie had a lot of potential. A step away from the clichés of common Hong Kong Triad movies, but the movie ended in a very weird state, one that I couldn’t really comprehend. It also left many unanswered questions and there were actions with no reason. I originally was going to rate it as high as an 8, but dropped it back down to 6 when the movie ended in limbo.
IMDb: 5.8/10 (27 votes)
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MY RATING: 6/10
Spoilers: (Show)
The movie starts of with the release of Yip Chau, who has been imprisoned in Thailand for 8 years. Before that he was a leader of a Hong Kong Triad. During these 8 years, he has been reading about economics and studying and planning what he’ll be doing when he gets out.
I’m not going to talk much about the storyline, as it basically was Yip Chau turning over a new leaf and how his past keeps catching back up to him. In the end, he basically disappears.
So there were a couple of people he really trusted. He borrowed a large sum of money from “The Professor”, a nick name of the leader of weapons/drugs dealer, promising double that amount in 2 years. Afterwards, he begins donating money to everything, doing charitable works, etc. He even starts his own finance company.
In the end, he fakes his death, and disappears from the world. And my question is, what the heck was his purpose?
He started out saying he wanted to test something, to test his plan that he had designed for the past 8 years. Obviously it worked to some point, but in the mean time, his friend goes into a coma and a police officer gets killed, which was so random may I add, as nothing really provoked it. What’s even worse is that he didn’t even see his friend who died trying to let him getaway one last time, but instead goes off and rescues a girl that he doesn’t even quite know that well. He also left everyone in the black, every single friend that was there with him.
Gwai Jai’s girlfriend also disappeared from the story after he dumps her.
Also, when the police broke into the lawyer’s house and took snapshots of letters and crap, they didn’t really use it. They didn’t even bother to use it to verify Yip Chau’s signature.
For the longest time, I though Yip Chau’s brother was the one who put the hit on him in Thailand. That was why he was crying that night when Yip Chau was about to get killed. That was why he never visited Yip Chau in prison. But that story really never got resolved either.
It was also obvious that Yip Chau was set up by his own lawyer to not let him go rescue the girl. However, that doesn’t get revealed at all either.
