Chung on sat luk: O gei

Organized Crime & Triad Bureau (Chungon satluk linggei) (1994).

A slightly above average entry in Hong Kong's continuing line of Triad thrillers, "Organized Crime & Triad Bureau" does contain some aspects that sets it apart from the mundane.

The first positive aspect is the acting of the two main stars, Anthony Wong and Danny Lee. Both of these actors are well experienced in this genre, with Danny Lee having done the gritty "The Big Heat" and Anthony Wong having done the classic "Hard Boiled."

However, the supporting cast is rather stereotypical, most are caricatures we have seen in many other films, often reduced to only a single trait and possessing no complex personality of their own. In addition, many of these actors' performances are over the top, thus diminishing the gritty realism the film sometimes succeeds in creating.

Yet another positive aspect is some well executed action scenes, most notably a scene near the beginning of the film where Danny Lee and Anthony Wong are sliding down a hill shooting at one another, a scene greatly reminiscent of Jon Woo's classics. Another scene to mention is the fatalistic ending which invokes the feeling of such films as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Unfortunately, these action scenes are few and far between. We are treated with these two exceptional scenes as bookends to the film, but what is in the middle is what really suffers...

The narrative is typical to say the least, it contains story elements that we have seen not only seen in other Triad thrillers, but also any crime thriller in general. The film also seems to drag for the most part because of this predictable nature, we know what to expect so nothing seems fresh to us. However, spurts of gritty violence and realism does manage to keep the film from losing the audience's interest entirely.

In terms of the cinematography and direction, the film seems very typical of the Triad thrillers coming out at the time. The film possesses some slow motion sequences to emphasize the character's emotions and then move with quick cuts to show the action's intensity. However, this is merely the music video approach that was very popular in the early 1990's and seems to make the film feel overly melodramatic rather than aesthetic, leading to a rather pretentious and "cheesy" feel.

I would recommend this film only to genre enthusiasts as it is not strictly average thanks to some aspects of quality, but too many flaws in the film causes me to recommend to the general film viewer to skip it.

Kirk Wong's follow-up to CRIME STORY is another police procedural movie, this time starring THE KILLER's Danny Lee. This film forgoes the action and martial arts of the director's previous film in favour of a more realistic and organised film that follows the dual story lines of a squad of cops and a criminal gang; each side finds itself perplexed and outwitted at times by the other, while the individual participants are stretched to breaking point.

Sad to say, ORGANIZED CRIME & TRIAD BUREAU is a bit of a testing film given that long stretches play out where not much really happens. For a film with this amount of dialogue, the characterisation is surprisingly slim; we learn a few things about the honour of the leads, but not too much. For a thriller, there isn't much suspense despite the intrigues of the plot and the chase-focused structure of the narrative.

Lee is a solid lead, although his wind is stolen by the reliable Anthony Wong (HARD-BOILED), playing one of his more sympathetic villainous characters. A near-hysterical Cecilia Yip acts in support alongside Fan Siu-Wong, who you may remember from THE STORY OF RICKY. Where this film does get good is in the large-scale, action-packed climax, which is quite brilliant and brings to mind the sheer bravado of the following year's HEAT, directed by Michael Mann; it's a pity the rest of the movie didn't follow suit.

Organized Crime & Triad Bureau (1994) is the second film in Hong Kong film maker Che-Kirk Wong Chi Keung's impressive and hyper gritty trilogy of films based on the reality of Hong Kong police and the gangsters they try to capture as well. The first film in the trilogy is Crime Story (1993) starring the comedy kung fu star Jackie Chan in his most serious and dramatic role in which he doesn't even smile during the whole piece! The third film, Rock 'n Roll Cop (1994) is an incredibly ultra violent and also often confusing depiction of violent robbery gang near the borber of Hong Kong and the mainland and the police that are after them. All three films have the impressive style of its director, a veteran and maverick maker in the tradition of John Woo and Ringo Lam, and my opinion is that Organized Crime & Triad Bureaus stands out in the trilogy.

Danny Lee is again a cop, inspector Lee, who doesn't follow the rules of the book too much and thus gets in trouble with his superiors more than often. He is also disliked by some of the other policemen even though his own "group" is very loyal to him. Anthony Wong (the legendary actor specialized in psychopathic roles such as the "bunman" in Herman Yau's harrowingly violent 1993 terror piece The Untold Story, a film from which Wong earned the best actor award in the HK Film Awards) plays a determined and quite sympathetic triad boss Tung who has inspector Lee on his tail. The cop is not so "good" all the time nor the triad boss is thoroughly "bad" and this is the theme we get to see depicted during the ride of 91 minutes of Hong Kong adrenalin filled cinema.

The film has a great cast and naturally Wong and Lee definitely know their job and don't over act at all. Lee has played cop so many times he has even received many thanks from the real police for his realistic and (often) human depiction of the force and its inspectors. Wong is pretty restrained considering what kind of perfomances he gave in films like the mentioned The Untold Story or Ebola Syndrome (1996) by the same director, Herman Yau. He is natural and some interesting deeper sides in his criminal character become very believable as he acts with so much talent. Cecilia Yip Tung is very interesting, too, and she is perhaps the "coolest" and most restrained Hong Kong actress I know. She doesn't talk when there's nothing to say and she tells so much by only her eyes and face. The love affair between Wong and Cecilia has its "dark sides" because of Wong's nature and habits but still Cecilia's love towards him, no matter what, is real since the acting and characters in the piece are so carefully constructed and believable. The other actors include Fan Siu Wong, the lead from Nam Lai Choi's insane ultra gore fest prison drama Story of Ricky (1991), and Roy Cheung, a bad guy actor from many Hong Kong films like Ringo Lam's "On Fire trilogy" School on Fire (1988), City on Fire (1987) and Prison on Fire (1987).

The film is pretty close to John Woo's themes as it depicts the many sides of people that are in the different sides of the law and very often visit the "grey area" of their minds and souls. The way how cops treat their suspects is something unspeakable and very inhumanely violent, and unfortunately, very true and taken from the incidents of real life as Kirk Wong has admitted. This depiction of police turning equally bad or even worse than the original criminal was taken to its absolute extremes in Yau's The Untold Story that gets almost unbearably intense in its scenes of police brutality. Also the criminals are not just bad guys here as Wong has his moral code especially towards the girl he loves. He is also not able to kill a wounded little boy at one scene and that scene is very effective as it has the same kind of infernally violent urban feeling as the hospital finale in John Woo's Hard Boiled (1992). So the two sides of our nature are there in the film as they are in every day life. And Organized Crime & Triad Bureau is real everyday life, perhaps even more so than some would dare to see and admit.

The visual look is also impressive as can be expected by Wong. His trademarks include the blue lit interiors and exteriors created by different techniques and lenses, hand held camera, extremely low angles during the action scenes, a technique that creates an incredibly fast and furious illusion in the hands of this gifted director. The chase finale of Rock 'n Roll Cop is perhaps the most insanely fast and ultra violent action sequence I've seen in any Hong Kong film, and the low, grass level angles and camera drives create it mostly. If Woo makes his films like a painter in the room full of glass, Wong makes his films like a rhino in that room, but both make them masterful and convincing!

The cinematographer Joe Chan Kwong-Hung's filmography includes many interesting and masterpiece films of Hong Kong cinema like Ringo Lam's dark and harrowing School on Fire, the same director's masterful bullet spitting action miracle Full Contact (1992) with its incredible "bullet cam" techniques and Billy Chung's severely mean spirited CAT III shocker Love to Kill (1993) to name just a few. The scenes in Organized Crime & Triad Bureau are pretty restrained in their visual style and there are some very nice effects like the speeding of the Hong Kong landscape shot to make the atmosphere and pace even more "on the edge" and hand touchingly realistic and "everyday".

The action scenes themselves are nothing short of spectacular again. They are not as greatly choreographed or martial arts oriented as in Crime Story, nor (quite) as graphically violent as in Rock 'n Roll Cop, but they are more like massive and very authentic and there is no question about what film Michael Mann without a doubt had seen when he was writing his 1995 action thriller Heat, which has a similar and fierce city war sequence with Wong's film. The shotgun blasting finale of Wong's film is breathtaking in its chases and violent shootouts and is also pretty close to the finale of Johnny Mak's classic Long Arm of the Law (1984), a film that is considered to be the very first of the "heroic bloodshed" films albeit it is not as claustrophobic as in Mak's film. Some of the scenes in Triad Bureau are rather violent, especially the flashback showing the dark past of Cecilia Yip's character. It is the kind of harrowing ultra violence at times that makes it hurt the viewer as much as the victim inside the film, and that is exactly the way to depict this bad thing, violence, realistically and so that it would affect and change our feelings about it. The violence is not as deep element in Wong's film as it is in Woo's films and characters, but still it definitely doesn't look any more nicer here. In fact, the violence in Wong's hands is so brutal and without any "Woo elements and symbols of beauty and emotion" that some may find it unpleasant if searching for nothing more than entertainment and good feelings in films.

Some negative points can be found in Wong's film, too. Some of the scenes seem to develop too fast and straightforwardly like the mentioned flashback that seems to happen a little too fast and simply. Also the way how the piece ends, a fate of one bureaucrat that has annoyed the police throughout the whole film, is a little too brutal as it kind of fights against the film's anti violent message and premise as it was based on the real facts of Hong Kong society, and especially when the guy was fighting the corruption in the force. Still these little flaws are pretty easy to forgive as the film is otherwise so impressive, honest and noteworthy, and definitely has more ambition and talent than most action related cops and robbers films of Hong Kong cinema.

Organized Crime & Triad Bureau is perhaps Kirk Wong's masterpiece. His 1988 Gunmen is also a noteworthy period action drama with great performances by Waise Lee (Johnnie To's 1988 film The Big Heat) and Tony Leung Ka Fai (Ringo's Prison on Fire), and the circle of war continuying in the society impresses in that film. Wong's debut, after he had returned to Hong Kong from England where he was studying in art school, was a harrowingly violent and brutal The Club (1981), a film that starred a real life triad member Michael Chan Wai Man as a triad member who gets right in the middle of a bloody fight over an ownership of one club that would give the greedy triads a nice profit. Kirk Wong is the talented rhino of Hong Kong cinema. His films manage to grap the breath, make the heart beat and make the thoughts run, and those are among the reasons why his films are among the most noteworthy ones in the Hong Kong action cinema. 8/10

"Organised Crime and Triad Bureau" is another modern-day cops and robbers movie from Hong Kong. It focuses on the efforts of cop Danny Lee (also seen in "The Killer") trying to catch syndicate boss Tung (Anthony Wong aka the arms dealer from "Hard Boiled").

Naturally there is a little more to the story than that, including a romantic side plot for Tung, police corruption and dishonesty, as well as the involvement of internal affairs and Lee's superiors. However, it's the cat and mouse between the two leads which takes centre stage.

OC&TB is not a perfect movie by any stretch. It does take its time getting started, there is a long sequence on an island which becomes a touch boring after a while and the romantic plot is never particularly engaging.

Despite these faults, OC&TB does have a number of points in its favour which makes it reasonably entertaining viewing. There are several decent plot twists to keep the viewer guessing (although some are rather predictable), the cast give pretty convincing performances and the occasional injection of humour into the very serious story makes for a good change of tone. The sequence at the beginning where Lee and his cops tell off internal affairs and hide the blood stains with a cup of tea is particularly memorable.

Also, OC&TB has a quite good climax which should leave most viewers satisfied. This foot chase and shoot out through the crowded streets of Hong Kong is well staged and nicely captured by director Che Kirk Wong (who has since directed the Hollywood film "The Big Hit"). Although it's not a patch on the hospital shoot-out from "Hard Boiled" (how many are?), it's still the film's greatest drawcard in my opinion.

In summary, OC&TB is an OK film which should please most HK action fans, although it's not going to rival the best works of John Woo.

6.5 / 10

To compare this film to the classics like The Killer or Beast Cops is unfair. This is more of a gritty drama than an action film, despite my one line summary.

This film has a few great elements going for it. The performances are quite good, especially Anthony Wong as the gangster pursued by Danny Lee (in another fine performance as a harried police inspector). Kirk Wong does a fine job on this film again - he seems to be in many ways like a Hong Kong version of Sidney Lumet. Both are obsessed with the police system, and this film is the one that illustrates that the most. This is not quite as good as the excellent Jackie Chan film Crime Story, which Wong also directed, but it's one to check out if you're a fan of Hong Kong films. Just don't expect the pyrotechnics of a John Woo film or the quirkiness of Gordon Chan and Dante Lam's Beast Cops. This is a very straightforward police procedural, boiled down to its purest essence.