The Stool Pigeon

线人

Hong Kong/China, 2010, colour, 2.35:1, 111 mins.

Director: Lin Chaoxian 林超贤 [Dante Lam].

Rating: 8/10.

The main cast of The Beast Stalker  reunites in a tense, more character-driven crime thriller.

STORY

Hong Kong, the present day. Following a drugs bust, detective Li Cangdong (Zhang Jiahui) is promoted to chief inspector but his stool pigeon Jabber (Liao Qizhi) is exposed and almost killed. A year later, Li Cangdong is told that Taiwan gangster Ba Bi, aka Barbarian (Lu Yi), is back in Hong Kong and planning another jewellers’ robbery. Li Cangdong recruits petty criminal/speed-car racer He Xikui (Xie Tingfeng), who’s about to be released from prison, as a stoolie to infiltrate the gang of Taiping (Jiang Haowen), whose men Ba Bi employs. He Xikui has inherited a large family debt, and his younger sister (Zhong Shuman) is being forced to work as a prostitute, so he accepts Li Cangdong’s offer. He Xikui is taken on as the driver in Ba Bi’s team, and gets to know his woman, Di (Gui Lunmei), whom he’d briefly met a few years ago in a chance encounter. He continues to feed Li Cangdong information on Ba Bi’s plans, despite a growing risk of being unmasked. Li Cangdong is also having more and more misgivings about the danger in which he puts his stoolies. And he has personal problems of his own: his dance instructor wife Xue (Miao Pu), from whom he is now separated, tried to commit suicide a few months previously and has since had amnesia.

REVIEW

Following The Beast Stalker 证人 (2008) and Fire of Conscience 火龙 (2010), Lin Chaoxian 林超贤 [Dante Lam] and regular scriptwriter Wu Weilun 吴炜伦 [Jack Ng] continue their move towards more character-based crime dramas with The Stool Pigeon 线人, which not only reverses the roles that leads Xie Tingfeng 谢霆锋 [Nicholas Tse] and Zhang Jiahui 张家辉 [Nick Cheung] played in Stalker (with Zhang this time a cop and Xie a criminal) but also casts against type both Mainland actor Liu Yi 陆毅 as a gangster and Taiwan actress Gui Lunmei 桂纶镁 as his trashy woman.

Rapidly becoming one of Hong Kong’s best character actors, Zhang is excellent as the cool, bespectacled police officer who harbours growing doubts about the ethics of gambling with stool pigeons’ lives, while Xie, who’s also been moving away from just pretty-boy roles, is totally convincing as a street criminal forced into an impossible situation. In the biggest change of her career, however, Gui, who made her name in Blue Gate Crossing 蓝色大门 (2002) and has since largely been in sweet parts (Secret 不能说的秘密, 2007; Ocean Heaven 海洋天堂, 2010), is remarkable here as a tough, jaded moll, expanding on the potential she showed for less decorative roles in All about Women 女人不坏 (2008).

Lin doesn’t exactly stint on the action expected of him as a genre director: a car chase through Kowloon to the strains of White Christmas and the final rough-and-tumble in a schoolroom are both memorable. But the tension and thrills are much more situational and character-driven here. A sequence in which Xie’s stoolie is almost discovered in a meeting with Zhang’s cop would not have been half as effective with lesser detailed roles.

Wu’s script also takes time to focus on the procedural side of running stool pigeons – money promised, paperwork to be signed, and so on. In a reflection of present-day Hong Kong, the real enemy here is bureaucracy, with both criminals and crime-fighters trapped by economic cutbacks and broken promises by superiors. Justice is shown to be done in the end, but it’s clear from the thin dividing line that Lin and Wu draw between both sides of the law that the filmmakers’ sympathies don’t exactly lie with the establishment.

Stool Pigeon is way less dark and claustrophic than Beast Stalker, and doesn’t have the same kind of complex, Swiss Clock-like plot. But it’s more deeply characterised from top to bottom, with much better chemistry between Xie and Zhang than between Li Ming 黎明 [Leon Lai] and Ren Xianqi 任贤齐 [Richie Ren] in Fire of Conscience. Only the subplot of the detective’s private life seems pasted into the overall drama. Widescreen photography by Xie Zhongdao 谢忠道 [Kenny Tse], who worked on all three pictures, has both grit and composition.

CREDITS

Presented by Emperor Classic Film (HK), Huayi Brothers Media (CN), Sil-Metropole Organisation (HK). Produced by Visual Capture (HK).

Script: Wu Weilun [Jack Ng]. Original story: Lin Chaoxian [Dante Lam]. Photography: Xie Zhongdao [Kenny Tse]. Editing: Chen Qihe [Chan Ki-hop], Xu Weijie [Matthew Hui]. Music: Li Yunwen [Henry Lai]. Art direction: Huang Bingyao [Pater Wong]. Costume design: Huang Jiabao [Stephanie Wong]. Sound: He Zhitang, Zeng Jingxiang [Kinson Tsang]. Action: Qian Jiale [Chin Ka-lok], Huang Weihui. Car stunts: Wu Haitang. Special effects: Chi Ruitian. Visual effects: Free-D Workshop. Second unit photography: Han Shixiang.

Cast: Xie Tingfeng [Nicholas Tse] (He Xikui/Ghost Jr.), Zhang Jiahui {Nick Cheung] (Li Cangdong/Don, chief inspector), Gui Lunmei (Di/Dee), Liao Qizhi [Liu Kai-chi] (Fei Weng/Jabber, the drugs-bust stoolie), Miao Pu (Xue/Cher, Li Cangdong’s wife), Lu Yi (Ba Bi/Barbarian), Zhong Shuman (He Xikui’s younger sister), Liu Jiang (Xue’s father), Jiang Haowen [Philip Keung] (Taiping), Zheng Danrui [Lawrence Cheng] (Xue’s brother), Li Chengchang (Li Cangdong’s boss), Wu Haokang (Ma Da/Fairing), Yin Yangming [Vincent Wan] (Ma Gou/Marco, drug trafficker), Lin Zhongqi (Ma Gou’s assistant), Jin Gang (Bao Zhu/Blast), Guo Zhenghong [Derek Kwok] (Gu, detective), Liang Xiaobing (Liang, social worker), Chen Kai’en (old stoolie), Li Mingxian (Zip), He Huachao (Ma Furong, pimp), Zhang Guoliang (police squad leader), Xu Xiaoling (singer), Huang Rong (night-shop woman), Lu Ziheng (driver of car hitting Xue), Li Jia (roadblock policeman), Zhang Junhong, Huang Weiliang, Huang Weihui (Tai-ping’s assistants), Xie Lusi (illegal doctor), Luo Chu’nan (driver), Qiu Song’er (Ba Bi’s girlfriend), Lao Shaojuan (abducted female driver), Ou Xuanwei (senior police officer), Zhou Zhiqiang (roadblock policeman), Liu Yumei (old woman neighbour), Zhang Dalun, Qin Qiwei, Yao Jiawen, Wu Weile, Li Zhihao, Yan Zifei, Chen Sha, Chen Xiaojing (Li Cangdong’s colleagues).

Release: China, 24 Aug 2010; Hong Kong, 26 Aug 2010.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 22 Sep 2010.)