201) Expect the Unexpected (1998)

201) Expect the Unexpected (1998) Dir: Patrick Yau and Wai Ka-Fai Not Yet Released Date Seen: June 28th, 2009 Rating: 3.5/5

The accomplished scenes of screwball romance in Expect the Unexpected come as a bit of a shock after The Longest Nite, a gritty, sweaty and totally grim neo-noir that both Yau and Wai worked on that same year. They have a breezy humor to them and a sense of optimism that few other Milkyway films that are not strictly romcoms have. In them, tension arises from whether or not good cop Ken (Simon Yam) or bad cop Sam (Lau Ching-Wan) will make the opportunities they need to get the girl they both pine for. This is a far cry from the story's investigation overplot, which climaxes in a final shoot-out whose extreme nature feels like a dark reminder of just whose universe we're working in. 

The bleakness of the film's ending intrigues me because not just because it creates a beautiful tableaux of violence worthy of its Peckinpah influence but because of something Wai recently said to me when I interviewed him. He said that: 

"Death is unavoidable so I think that if there’s some change in the way that I’ve [approached the] topic when I was young, maybe I was more poetically thinking about it. Maybe evil cannot beat the good ultimately. As I get older, my thinking has become, 'Well, sometimes you can choose.'"

That choice is crucial because here, the characters squander theirs and in so doing, they lose all of their chances, which perhaps makes the final grisly shoot-out punishment for not recognizing their potential. It's a damning finale but one that strikes me as a weird kind of divine authorial tough love.

189) The Longest Nite (1998)

189) The Longest Nite (1998) Dir: Johnnie To, Wai Ka-Fai and Patrick Yau Not Yet Released Date Seen: June 20th, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

While I couldn't say why immediately, it was obvious that the five scenes that Patrick Yau directed before The Longest Nite were different from the superb noirish framework Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai gave them. Yau's scenes all revolve around spontaneous violence, creating jaw-dropping moments of insane black humor thanks to their frighteningly abrupt and volatile nature. To and Wai probe the nature of those scenes with a tangled plot that could only come from them (the film's central metaphor of being a rubber ball, full of restless motion but not being able to control where you go, is very much Wai's cinematic worldview distilled). Moody and dark, the film is yet another exceptional transitional film in To's career, a movie that like Hero Never Dies (also 1998) pushes him from his so-so earlier films to the string of great films that he continues to crank out today.

Note: Tony Leung Chiu-wai was seriously miscast here. The film can be broken down into four quarters. First and last are when the film goes off-the-rails and requires Tony to be an unhinged tough guy capable of matching Lau Ching-wan's effortless attitude; the middle half is a traditional whodunnit plot. Leung does well with the that latter chunk but is never really convincing in the former. These extended bookend scenes are crucial in changing Leung's character from a mild-mannered detective into a vicious character capable of anything, just like Lau's character. Leung instead shows that he's best when he's playing characters that look breathless and confused all the time, which is nowhere near the enigmatic anti-hero the role required.