COMEUPPANCE (Hong Kong, 2000)
Directed by: Derek Chiu
Starring: Jordan Chan, Patrick Tam, Sunny Chan, Wu Hsin-kuo

One of the biggest surprises of 2000, COMEUPPANCE snuck in like a lamb at Christmastime, surrounded as it was by the big-budget, empty-headed bombast that's come to signify holiday moviegoing around the world. Scarily smart, darkly hilarious, and precise as a laser, it's a post-modern Agatha Christie murder mystery that's light-years ahead of most American (and Asian) independent films. A poisoner's tale of a stressed-out photo shop employee (everything he knows about poison he learned on the job) who suddenly starts murdering the big time gangsters who cross his path, COMEUPPANCE is an almost-wordless comedy fugue of small objects exchanging hands and split-second (missed) connections, scored for three single guys living in the big city.

Hak, a greasy newspaper photographer (Jordan Chan, wearing one of the ugliest wigs ever put onscreen) is offered a job writing a newspaper serial based on the first murder and it quickly develops a voracious readership, including the poisoner who starts using Hak's writing as inspiration, much to Hak's dismay. Throw in a bemused cop (Sunny Chan) who's desperate to figure out how it all fits together, a hapless arms dealer, a Taiwanese gangster/chef, and a world full of dog-eat-dog flunkies and you've got a chaotic comic strip of a movie that richly rewards multiple viewings.

Celebrating the web of accidents, coincidences, casual comments, lucky breaks, and stupid mistakes that are city living, COMEUPPANCE unleashes an all-polka soundtrack and a pitch black point of view on the urban ecosystem. Everyone in this movie is inspired by someone else, who stole the idea from the newspaper, which plagiarized from the trash, which turns out to have been left there by the first person in the chain in the first place. More committed to recycling than most tenant's committees (including the iconic deployment of a scrap of Jet Li's HITMAN from off the lab floor), it's a movie for anyone who's ever wondered how the water got to their sink, or who used the public toilet before them. COMEUPPANCE is a poison pen love letter to that tentative matrix called city living that'll warm the black little cockles of your heart.