
Toronto - Once in a while, it’s good to reconnect with your roots. Sunday night, I watched a movie made from the motherland (actually my polish landed immigrant roommate got it - weird). The movie was called “The Detective” and is brought to you by the Pang brothers, who made their name doing the horror flicks “The Eye” and obviously, “The Eye 2″. That’s the thing about movies, specially Asian movies. If the first movie is successful, there will be a sequel. You can have a movie about the end of the world, where at the end of the movie, everyone on Earth dies, and then the Earth gets blown up, and then our whole galaxy is sucked up by a black hole and if that movie makes enough money, there’ll somehow be a sequel.
The movie stars Aaron Kwok, one of the four big names from the 90s, as a private eye type detective. The movie takes place in Thailand, but everyone speaks cantonese in the movie. I guess we took that place over too. Basically the movie starts off with some dude who stumbles in, shows some money and asks our protagonist to find some chick. The rest of movie follows this detective as he stumbles into some kind of murderous plot and the body count rises. Some other people play some characters that has something to do with the story, but mainly, its a one man show.
Man, this movie was intense. First of all, lets talk about the cinematography, this movie is filmed unlike many other chinese movie (read: cheap). Theres some stylish filter work going on here, reminds me of some of tony scotts work (minus the suckyness) and some nice night shots. Basically, they saturate some colors thru out the film. The camera work is pretty good, you can tell they did horror movies since they do a lot of point of view shots, as if the main character was being followed and stuff. Its pretty good.
That was only 20% of the reason why this movie was intense. The 80% was the score. You know how in most movies, when there is a tense scene, the score builds up and theres a lot of tension in the scene, and then after that scene is over, the score dies down and you can relax? Well thats like this movie, only the score never lets up, so every scene in the movie seems overly important and intense. It works in adding suspense, but it starts wearing on you after awhile. Like seriously, they could of had the lead character taking a dump, and with that score, i woulda thought a dragon woulda flew out of his ass. Thats how dramatic it was.
This movie has also two of the most random end of movie twists that I have ever scene. Thats all I am saying. They comes out of nowhere. I won’t spoil it, but you will never ever see them coming. Me and my roommate had no idea how to react to it, whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing, i don’t know.
All in all, this movie is probably worth a watch.
3/5