THE LONGEST NITE (1998)
Director: Patrick Yau
Starring: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Lau Ching-wan, Maggie Shiu, Mark Cheng

"THE LONGEST NITE was the biggest challenge in my career. No precedents, nothing to rely on, nothing to copy from. I kept asking myself: yes or no? Work or doesn't work?" - Johnnie To

Deepest, darkest film noir, slick as the 70's and mean as a snake, director Patrick Yau's The Longest Nite is a diseased hybrid of Orson Welles' Lady From Shanghai and Touch of Evil. Tony Leung Chiu-wai (Hard Boiled, Chungking Express) is a corrupt cop on Macau, a Portuguese island off the coast of Hong Kong famous for its gambling and gang wars, sort of a Chinese Las Vegas before it cleaned up its act. Two warring Macanese gangs sit down for a negotiation and it’s up to Tony to keep the simmering tensions down to a dull rumble. Over the course of 24 claustraphobic hours he streaks all over the island administering beatings, disposing of corpses, torturing suspects, and plugging up leaks so that the criminal status quo will be maintained and he'll be able to carry on business as usual. And then the Hitman shows up.

Bald-headed, tattooed, and carrying an ominous bowling bag, Lau Ching-wan starts crossing Tony's field of vision, making deliveries, taking phone calls, delivering veiled threats. He's the chaos Tony's trying to control and the two start tweaking each other's volume knobs, until whatever else they were doing falls by the wayside and they get obsessed with trying to squash one another like bugs.

Originally, Patrick Yau shot just five scenes of this picture before running into a creative brick wall. Producer/writer Wai Ka-fai, and director Johnnie To came in and tossed the script out the window, shuffling and reshuffling those five scenes into a brand new dead man’s hand and turning the movie into a haunted house full of unseen, malevolent gangland bosses and spooky headless corpses. Like a vengeful ghost, the movie lays its cold malignant hand on your throat and just rests it there - a sleepy menace. Everyone thinks they're king of the world, because they don't know any better, but the more they learn, the more they freak, and as corpses and bags of money start appearing in the wrong places it's clear that they're just rats in a sack, tearing each other up while someone on the outside shakes them up and down. The question is who?

One long experiment in just how much hell a director can put his characters through without reducing the audience to a quivering wreck, cowering under their seats, and clawing at the exit doors, The Longest Nite is a haunted movie seething with poisonous visuals and blows to the head. As dawn approaches, and the best laid plans go wetly awry, the plot breaks down into an expressionistic nightmare as Macau and all its real world gang violence fractures and falls away leaving our two protagonists slugging it out amongst the shards.

This is film noir at its most stressed-out.