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Alan Mak sort of revisits his creative peak but can’t navigate the dark roads that made it, well, his peak.
Under Current
Director: Alan Mak • Writers: Alan Mak, Lam Fung
Starring: Aaron Kwok, Simon Yam, Francis Ng, Alex Fong, Niki Chow
Hong Kong • 1hr 55mins
Opens Hong Kong December 6 • IIB
Grade: B-
Under Current | 內幕 is a misnomer if ever there were one. Undercurrents imply nuance and layers in a song, a poem, a painting, a book, a film – or a person. The best crime thrillers from Hong Kong or anywhere are loaded with undercurrents: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Kim Seong-hun’s A Hard Day, William Friedkin’s The French Connection, John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak Siu-fai’s Infernal Affairs, Hong Kong’s own Lord of the Rings saga. The thing that made each of those films great was their ambiguity and distinct lack of moral absolutism, their respect for human nature and the wildly divergent ideas we each hold of what’s right and what’s wrong. Alas, those days are over, and the censors can sit back and relax. Their work is practically done, because films like Under Current, which is most, is a simple narrative of good and bad – signalled in Act I – in which high powered law firm partner Ma Ying-fung (Aaron Kwok Fu-shing) only represents rapists because he’s ordered too, and the most dogged of police investigators, Or Ting-pong (Francis Ng Chun-yu), are above reproach, give or take a search warrant or two.
Mak’s suspiciously law-sceptical Under Current follows 2019’s Integrity, about a customs malfeasance whistleblower in which the ICAC came to the rescue. But this latest outing is more reminiscent of Donnie Yen’s ass-whupping The Prosecutor, particulary given Ma’s expertise in taekwondo (!). You bet that’s important in the end. The whole thing feels more like a once-defining genre grasping at straws than an homage to the bad ol’ days, and no number of bad ol’ days stars are going to change that. Amusing? Sure. The next Infernal Affairs? Nope.
Exemplars of law and order
Tsai Bat Tong is the charitable trust at the centre of the action. When he hangs himself in sensational fashion in front of the cameras, audience and donors at TBT’s annual gala, its CFO Yeung To (Simon Yam Tat-wah) becomes the target and/or scapegoat in a $200 million embezzling scandal that gets Or’s attention. He starts sniffing around TBT’s legal firm but gives up when he’s busted without a warrant by Ma. Luckily for Or, Ma’s in a pissy mood, having just come from court where he defended – and won acquittal for – the privileged brat son of one of the firm’s clients on rape charges. For… reasons, he agrees to snoop on Or’s behalf and winds up a partner of sorts; kind of an inside man. His pissy mood extends to iciness towards his girlfriend Man-ying (Niki Chow Lai-kei) another lawyer at the firm, whose daddy (David Chiang Da-wei) is senior partner.
Meanwhile, TBT chair Ko Sing-man (Alex Fong Chung-sun, doing his best to give Ko’s motives and reactions any shade) has his right hand lackey Ku (Power Chan Kwog-pong) frantically running around Hong Kong chasing the missing cash and erasing any evidence of Ko’s involvement and more specifically any connection to him, though we know he’s neck-deep in the shit. What starts as a one man’s dying wish to come clean and atone for his complicity turns into a sprawling conspiracy of murder for hire, money laundering, orphan robbery, long lost junkie children, terminal illness and trafficking in drugs that explode.
Under Current has plenty going for it, don’t get me wrong. There’s lots of silly fun – I mean, come on, lawyer-slash-taekwondo master with impeccable hair is good stuff. Mak and co-writer Lam Fung lean hard into the psychotic Japanese gangster tropes (Asano Nagahide’s nutso Noguchi is way over the top), it has the requisite, hilariously retrograde “jokes” (about how a man who doesn’t eyeball a woman like she’s a steak must be gay) and possibly the best set-up of Chekhov’s recycling paper ever put to film. But the loaded cast of Kwok, Ng, Yam, Fong, Chiang and a laundry list of solid supporting players (German Cheung Man-kit, Peter Chan Charm-man, Nina Paw Hei-ching, Max Cheung Tat-lun) are invariably going to give the film more credibility than it earns. Adding to that is who may be the standout: veteran Felix Lok Ying-kwan as the Big Bad Mr Kah. By design or otherwise, Lok gives Kah a favourite, sweet uncle presence and unassuning countenance that makes his silent menace all the more threatening when he lets his anger bubble to the surface. It’s just too bad there wasn’t more to Kah’s rot and its trickle down impact on Ko and Yeung. Just imagine what Ringo Lam would have done with this.