It’s a Mole Hunt

The Departed, directed by Martin Scorsese, was released in 2006 and it feels like a very Scorsese film. It’s a dark film with a twisting narrative that focuses on the grimy, crime-filled underbelly of a city and the people on both sides of the equation, the cops and the criminals. While the story itself is one that you could see just about any director making, the way Scorsese handles it makes the movie into a masterpiece. His version couldn’t have come from anyone else, and he makes the material so good that it’s hard to see the story outside of the way he tells it.

Which is what makes going back to the source material, Infernal Affairs, so weird. Obviously this Hong Kong action flick came first, and it directly influenced the remake. But going back and watching the original version it felt very strange, like I was seeing a first draft of a film that could have used a little more time in the hopper. It’s not that Infernal Affairs is bad. Hell, if The Departed didn’t exist my opinion of the original film would be untainted and I’d think it’s a pretty decent movie. But when you have Scorsese working on a project, generally, you’re going to end up with a fantastic final result.

The plot of Infernal Affairs, like The Departed, focuses on two characters. One, Senior Inspector Lau Kin-ming (Andy Lau), works as a detective in a major crimes department, but is secretly a mole in the Hong Kong Police for Triad boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang). The other, Chan Wing-yan (Tony Leung), works for Hon but, secretly, has been undercover for the police for the last ten years. Each is working the same case, in effect, coming at it from different directions as Chan tries to bring Hon down while Lau tries to stymie the Police and help Hon stay at least one step ahead at all times.

The two end up in a cat and mouse game when Lau realizes that Hon has a mole within his organization. He realizes that, during a drug deal, someone is communicating with the task force’s lead agent, Superintendent Wong Chi-shing (Anthony Wong), via morse code over short-wave radios. That spurns Hon into action, causing him to act more erratically as he tries to find out who the mole is. Meanwhile, Chan figures out that Hon has a mole within the Police, but he keeps getting stopped any time he finds a trail to follow. These two will keep circling each other until a confrontation happens, and when it does, chaos will follow in their wake.

Credit where it’s due, Infernal Affairs is a svelte movie that doesn’t linger longer than it has to. Clocking in at 101 minutes, the film gets in, gets the job done, and gets out without dragging things along. By comparison, The Departed (which is great, mind you) is 50 minutes longer and it uses all that time to tell, functionally, the same story. Every major beat from that film originates in Infernal Affairs, and the movie is able to keep as much tension, and all the twisty storytelling, that made the later Hollywood version so good. It just does it faster.

This is a good thing, in many ways. I appreciate that the film puts a ton of focus on the story and gets it moving. The film is able to gain serious momentum as it pushes from set piece to set piece, never stopping, barely pulling the focus away from the main story. If what you want is a movie that focuses solely on the cat and mouse game between the two leads as they chase each other and try to push the other out into the sunlight, this film has that. It’s the whole focus on its existence.

But, because of that, the film doesn’t have quite as strong a sense of its characters. The Departed spends a fair bit of time building up the two leads, giving you a sense of who each of them are and why, as they end up on opposites as two moles, they make the choices they do. Infernal Affairs, by comparison, jumps much more quickly into the story, leaving all of that development out. Fans of the films would argue that Scorsese’s film took plot and character beats from the prequel Infernal Affairs II, but I can appreciate that the Hollywood version gives us a more complete picture because, yes, we need that character development here and not in a different movie that comes later.

While the main characters are fleshed out enough (although they certainly could use more), the focus on story over characters hurts the side characters more. Lau, for instance, has a fiance, Mary (Sammi Cheng), who works as a writer. Most of what we know about her is that she’s writing a story about a duplicitous man living multiple lives at once (clearly a hint that she’s realizing the man she’s living with has some kind of double life going on). But Mary is little more than a prop, there to highlight Lau’s life without acting as a real person in her own regard. Similarly Chan has a psychiatrist, Lee Sum-yee (Kelly Chen), who acts as a love interest for him. The film, though, doesn’t have time to really invest in these two, so their relationship, burgeoning as it is, feels like an afterthought.

The one hardest hit by the faster runtime, though, is Hon Sam. Hon should be our master villain of the piece, pulling the strings while he charismatically sits on the throne he’s devised. He needs to be a colorful character that could pull Lau under his sway, but just interesting enough that we actually could root for him, even a little. He should feel like a force, and not just a stuffed shirt hanging around to motivate the movie. But Infernal Affairs never develops Hon like it should. We don’t get a real sense of him as a character, and as such when justice (well, kind of) does come for him, we barely care because we aren’t invested in him.

With all of that said there is a lot to like about the film. It’s breezy and moves at a solid clip, with strong production values for its HK$20 Mil (approx $2 Mil USD, give or take) budget. It’s slick and well made, with a grittiness that really suits the story. And though the main characters rarely meet, there’s real chemistry between them. You get the sense, just from the few moments they share together, that they easily could have been friends if things had played out differently for the two of them. It’s tragic, and the actors make you feel for them, such that you wish you could spend more time with the two to get a real sense of them as people.

Which, yeah, you can do if you go and watch the two follow-up films. There’s the prequel, Infernal Affairs II, and then a semi-prequel/semi-sequel Infernal Affairs III (plus other remakes, televisions shows, and more in this ever expanding franchise). But it’s the original film that started it all, and it is pretty solid. Not perfect, and I do feel like The Departed takes the material here and does it even better, but as a first version of the story, Infernal Affairs has something that really works. I liked it and, even with a different version out there I liked even more, I could still see coming back to watch this film from time to time. It’s twisty storytelling, and solid acting from the leads, makes it one worth watching.