Overheard
When a US studio snaps up remake rights to a foreign film, it’s often hard to picture the elements that made the original special in the first place surviving the translation into the Hollywood style. The piece might depend on cultural specifics that won’t work with American characters. It might succeed on the basis of a delicately sustained tone that seems impossible to capture a second time. The impending Hollywood version of Let the Right One In comes to mind. For similar reasons I've always been glad that the long-bruited American version of The Killer never made it out of development.
Overheard [HK, Felix Chong and Alan Mak] is, on the other hand, the kind of movie Hollywood should be remaking. It’s a plot-driven thriller with a fresh premise that could occur in any country with a stock market. The film makes diverting hay of its basic concept but doesn’t knock it out of the park, leaving room for the hypothetical remake writer to improve on the original.
Three underpaid cops from an electronic surveillance division enter a slippery slope of danger and corruption when they decide to cash in on the insider trading scheme they’ve been assigned to listen in on. Lau Ching Wan downshifts his charisma into a lower key as a passive guy secretly seeing getting another chance with his supervisor’s estranged wife. Daniel Wu is a young officer pressured by his rich fiancee’s father to increase his earning potential. The truly memorable performance comes from Louis Koo, who deglamorizes to play a disaffected working-class schlub facing a family medical crisis.
Of structural interest is the way that the film shifts through different cop sub-genres for each of its three acts. It starts as a stylish techno-procedural, becomes a noirish guilt spiral in the middle, and then rounds its final turns in typically doom-laden HK fashion.
Ragged in spots and perhaps failing to wring maximum juice from its original core idea, it’s still worth a gander if you like the actors or are a diehard Hong Kong cinema fan. Like most HK movies you can safely assume that it will show up as an import DVD in fairly short order.
Click to viewI caught this at the gala opening of the Reel Asian Film Festival, which meant that it was proceeded by a punishing twenty minutes of welcoming speeches. Yikes!