MAD DETECTIVE (Hong Kong, 2007)
Directed by: Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai
Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Andy On, Lam Ka-tung, Kelly Lin, Lam Suet, Karen Lee
“...reaffirms To’s status as an action master...”
                                                                                    - the New York Times

From 1995 to 1999, director Johnnie To and actor Lau Ching-wan made nine crime films together that are some of the best in the genre. A collaboration as intense and rewarding as that between James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock or Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, these nine films not only gave Lau Ching-wan the best roles of his career but they lent a galvanizing, charismatic energy to To’s sometimes claustrophobic films. Except for a couple of comedies, the two men haven’t worked together for seven years until MAD DETECTIVE. This darkly shining thriller veers from comedy to tragedy before Lau Ching-wan and Johnnie To push each other past the normal boundaries of cinema and on to something truly unique. A breathtaking achievement, it’s the only movie that the Masters of Cinema collection in the United Kingdom (the UK’s equivalent of America’s Criterion Collection) has included in their select catalogue, which includes masterpieces by Fritz Lang, Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles.

Co-directed by Johnnie To and screenwriter Wai Ka-fai (whom To refers to as “a genius”), the mad detective of the title is Inspector Bun (Lau Ching-wan) a cop who works on a near-supernatural level of intuition and who can see other people for what they really are. Drop him in front of a nagging office manager and he’ll see an old woman, put him in the room with someone who has multiple personality disorder and he’ll see them as seven different people. At the start of the movie, Inspector Bun is staging the recreation of a gruesome murder, climaxing with being locked in a suitcase and thrown down several flights of stairs, just like the victim. Emerging bruised and battered on the ground floor he announces, “It was the ice cream vendor.” Case closed. But his gift has a dark side and after sawing off his own ear and presenting it to his superior officer as a gift, he’s put out to pasture. Five years later, Officer Ho Ka-on (Andy On) is assigned to solve a case where two cops pursued a criminal into a dark forest but only one came out. Unable to get any leads, Officer Ho recruits the mad detective to assist his investigation but it turns out that not only does no one want to know the truth, but the truth will wind up burying them all. One of those rare movies where the screenplay, the performances, the editing, the sound design and the cinematography all work in harmony like a precision Swiss watch, MAD DETECTIVE does in 89 minutes what most movies never achieve: it dazzles you and then breaks your heart.