IMDb #208 Review: Infernal Affairs

Source: Wikipedia

Ignore the dumb pun in the title. This is no wacky Jackie Chan comedy about a Chinese-American cop who goes to hell to liberate his fallen buddies from the devil’s clutches via kung-fu and secretly seducing Lucifer’s hot girlfriend. Though that'd be rad.

Instead, we follow two double lives. One, a bright young cop tasked to infiltrate a Hong Kong drug cartel — for ten years. The other, a dirty cop — working for the same cartel.

Neither knows the other’s identity. The result: spy versus spy, a battle of balls and bullshitting and late nineties tech, set to thumping techno beats.

The clean cop paradoxically surrounds himself with scum. His ex is afraid of him because, to everyone except his boss, he’s a grizzled gangster. And after a decade undercover, he’s cracking. Understandable. Because he sleeps through his mandatory therapy, while the therapist plays Microsoft solitaire.

Meanwhile, the dirty cop enjoys a solid reputation on the force, as well as a loving and pregnant wife. Even as the investigation crumbles (thanks to his efforts), he gets promoted. His new assignment: catch the dirty cop.

It’s pretty intense.

Yes, there are car chases and shootouts and pointless shoehorned romance arcs. Any movie can have those things. But for moral dilemmas, complex characters, dramatic irony, high-stakes cat-and-mouse (where the mouse is secretly a cat, and the cat an overgrown rat) — look no further.

OH CRAP twist piles upon OH CRAP twist. Then the gut-punch of an ending finally pulverizes whatever squishy pulp of heart you’ve got left.

Recommended for police academy valedictorians (who’ve yet to experience the phenomenon of project creep), happy wives (as a primer to spot consummate liars), and morbidly curious Hong Kong tourists.

101 minutes.