IkhwanArif
In the myriad categories of films that Hong Kong produces, Infernal Affairs stand heads and shoulders above the rest and is rightfully lauded as Hong Kong's best modern achievement.Simply put; everyone, from the cast and crew, brought their A game and this is a high quality thriller that really showcases Hong Kong's talent in it's film industry. Alan Mak and Felix Cheung crafted a beautiful of espionage, of a cat and mouse game between Hong Kong Police and Brother Sam's Triad.
And this story is told brilliantly through the direction of Andrew Lau as well as Alan Mak himself. The pacing is wonderful, not taking too long for a plot to develop, and never overstaying it's welcome. Comparing this to the Departed, Scorsese tend to overwhelm the audience with too much exposition with the actors DiCaprio, Damon and Nicholson overacting the scene, making the tension, urgency and drama contrived and asphyxiating.In Infernal Affairs, Lau and Mak. The drama, urgency and tension is created through atmosphere; conveyed by the actors along with the cinematography, and sound. The best example of this is the identical scene between Sullivan and Costello in the Departed and Lau and Sam in Infernal Affairs. In the Departed, Sullivan (Damon) finally met again with Costello (Nicholson), they had 5 minute chat of what's going on to fill the audience with what's actually happening.But compare this to Infernal Affairs, when Inspector Lau (Andy Lau) finally met Brother Sam (Eric Tsang) again; there was no talking, they just had a look, there were flashbacks, and everybody watching knew what's going on and what's going to happen.That is clever story telling; to tell you a story without using words.So, kudos to Andrew Lau and Yiu Fai Lai for a great camera work, and the sound team for nailing the dramatic scenes.Despite all my praise, Infernal Affairs is not perfect. Yan's interest with Dr Lee is unnecessary and the music for the scenes were cringey a.f. Yan's relationship with May was also completely unnecessary here and out of place with the May's daughter being the "is she or isn't she" makes no sense within the context of the movie.But overall, this is the best Hong Kong film that came out in the 21st Century, and it is conclusively better than Scorsese's The Departed.
SquigglyCrunch
Infernal Affairs follows the police department as they attempt to find the criminal mole in their midst while the opposing gang attempts to find the undercover mole in their group. If you ask me this is a pretty awesome concept. Neither side is able to get anywhere with the other because they're both constantly receiving information from the other. It's a conflict that can't end with either side winning until they take action specifically against their opposing moles. I'm not doing it justice, but it's pretty cool.Unfortunately, it doesn't handle it nearly as well as it could. The acting, for starters, is okay. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bland. It really depends. Most of the time it was pretty good, but it does falter enough for it to matter. The movie suffers from it's lack of ability to develop any of the characters or their relationships. Some of them have romantic relationships that are treated like a major part of the story, but they're so poorly written and unfocused that it makes it hard to really care about them. My biggest frustration with the movie is the editing. It's hilarious how dated it is. Multiple scenes end with a still frame while dialogue continues to play, followed by the screen fading to black. When did this movie come out? 2002? Yeah, it's a little late for that. Clearly someone didn't get the memo. Overall Infernal Affairs has an awesome concept that it couldn't quite pull off. The writing and characters aren't fleshed out enough, and the editing is hilariously dated. In the end I'd really only recommend this movie to a handful of people.
MisterWhiplash
The given is that a remake will not be as good as the original. It may be there for reasons that a studio needs to put out something, they have the rights now, let's do another spin on it. And it's not like remakes are new, they've been around since the 1930's in film, maybe even before that (were silent films remade from other silent versions, maybe, but I digress). The Departed was one of those rare occasions where not only did the filmmakers and actors improve on the previous story, they added to it, enhancing the plot. Of course the main ingredients were there in Lau and Leung's film, but it's like taking a bite out of a piece of fried chicken from your local Chinese food delivery, and getting a crisp, golden-fried piece from that awesome restaurant in the city - same bird, different spices and oil. I should let this film on its own speak for itself, and to be fair it does work on its own as a film. But the work of Scorsese, Monahan, DiCaprio/Damon/Nicholson et all took the main plot (and ironically Scorsese quipped it was his first movie that had a plot) and added humor, subtext, extra characters, real romance and stakes that weren't there before.Infernal Affairs is a good movie though because its plot is strong and compelling - you got the cop undercover in the mob, and the young mobster picked by the boss to be undercover in the ranks as a cop. The dramatic possibilities are on a silver platter for any writer (though on the flip-side it could become cliché and trite in the misguided hands). Here, we get a story that has very little fat story-wise, as we follow the drug busts, the twists, the tracking of one cop to another and the deaths of certain cops and criminals, and it's ultimately about the price paid, morally speaking, in this world - which can be a lot or a little depending on which side you're on.Again, it's hard to under-sell how much The Departed looms in my mind seeing the film. It's not totally fair, I know this, but it's also hard when so many scenes are much alike... and yet you can see where, in the opposite of what happens in adaptations, the new filmmaker adding to what's already there. And yet there's certainly good things to recommend about Infernal Affairs, especially if you like specifically HK cop movies - actually, if you're a die-hard follower of those, this seems to be a quintessential watch.At the top of what's good here are the two main actors, Tony Leung and Andy Lau as the cop and criminal undercover respectively. Leung has the more intense part - when we see him after a prologue he has been undercover for 10 years - and I was astonished by how much he dug into the turmoil of this character (normally I see him in more romantic stuff like Wong Kar Wai's films, but here, as in The Grandmaster, he shows he has the cops for it). Lau is also very good, but has to play more... reserved isn't the word, but he has to show fewer emotions, unless he's with his psychiatrist girlfriend (not that developed as a character, by the way, just enough to get by). The two actors, how they play every scene, is captivating.But while the villain here, Sam (Eric Tsang), is fairly strong, I never felt much of a threat or sense of danger about him. Again, hard to stay away from its American version, but there's much less there than in Nicholson's character (albeit that had the boost from Whitey Bulger's story from Boston). With the exception of maybe a couple of scenes, like when the drug deal goes down in the first act of the film, he too doesn't seem to have much to do except act sort of menacing, in a subdued sort of way, to his underlings. It's not that he has to be fun or exciting, but... maybe he does. Maybe he could have been the wildcard or piece of mania to give the material that extra boost.Infernal Affairs works as a kind of well-oiled machine of a thriller, and hen those major turns happen - the reveals of who is really who and not what really seems is what it is - it's satisfying. But it's got its share of flaws, namely in a score that is sappy-melodramatic, like right after when the death of a particular character happens and the hero looks on in despair. And while the directors here have a lot of excellent shots and cinematography to work with in the HK sky-line (and always with the rooftops, a joke is made at one point, which is nice), there's flashbacks once too much. I can give it to this movie that, unlike some other HK action thrillers, this isn't convoluted, it's straight-forward enough really. Actually, so straightforward it doesn't need certain obvious moments repeated for the audience.So, in short, even if I'd seen this before the Departed, it would still work as a movie. But it has short-comings as it is, I didn't find it to be that All-Time Great HK Cop Thriller that some have elevated it to, and if one puts it up against a interpretation by a master filmmaker the faults show more.
