TACTICAL UNIT: COMRADES IN ARMS (Hong Kong, 2008)
Directed by: Law Wing-cheong
Starring: Simon Yam, Maggie Siu Lam Suet

Remember the pickpocket in last year’s Johnnie To movie SPARROW who wound up having to dress in drag to steal a key? Or the restaurant owner in THE MISSION who let Anthony Wong in after hours to slice some throats that needed slicing? That’s Law Wing-cheong, longtime assistant director for Johnnie To and an editor of such classic Milkyway productions as ELECTION 2, RUNNING ON KARMA and NEEDING YOU. He was also the associate director and editor of PTU, the award-winning Johnnie To film from 2003 about beat cops (Police Tactical Units, usually teams of four) over the course of one long, dark night in Tsim Sha Tsui, trying to track down a stolen gun. So who better to direct this sequel to PTU than Law Wing-cheong himself?

Produced by Johnnie To, this is one of To’s recent series of PTU films that use the same characters and actors as the original PTU to tell further stories of these noble flatfoots. It’s six years later and Lam Suet, who was a detective who lost his gun to some triad punks in PTU, has been demoted to a PTU van driver. Simon Yam is still Brother Sam, a simmering, occasionally brutal career uniformed cop, but this time around, May (Milkyway regular, Maggie Siu), has been promoted over his head, leading to tension between the two, and their teams, that threatens to erupt into one of them punching the other in the face. 

When an armored car robbery goes down the crooks flee to the heavily wooded Red Flower Peak, near the border of Mainland China, and these city cops are dropped into the wilderness to track down the heavily armed bad guys (who are played by the same actors as the ill-fated strongarm crew from the end of PTU – I guess they got better). “Hope we won’t bump into the bad guys,” says May and that sums up these cops perfectly. These aren’t the macho hard cases of most cop movies, but uniformed officers concerned with promotions and death benefits and what’s for lunch. They engage in office politics even at gunpoint, refusing to repair flat tires until a mechanic shows up, but as accidents snowball out of control, a fog moves in, radio communication is lost in the hills and every coincidence becomes a stroke of bad luck, a walk in the park becomes a life or death mission. “This is a job, not a war,” one of them complains, but in movies like PTU, TACTICAL UNIT – COMRADES IN ARMS and even Johnnie To’s LIFELINE, it’s the people who hold down jobs and punch the clocks who are the world’s real heroes. 

Filmed by Ching Siu-keung (director of photography on nearly every Milkyway movie from SPARROW and the Cannes sensation VENGEANCE all the way back to LOVING YOU in 1995), written by Yau Nai-hoi (EYE IN THE SKY) and with music by Chung Chi-wing (who has composed for dozens of Milkyway films from THE MISSION to the original PTU) this film is stuffed with Milkyway’s stable of character actors, from Simon Yam and Maggie Siu, to Lam Suet, Samuel Pang and many more. Visually impressive, the movie turns into an essay in rocks, fog, sunlight, trees, hills and gorges and while none of the characters finds redemption or comes to some major conclusion, that’s the point. For a beat cop, on some bad days, just going home alive is more than enough.