Divergence

I loved this movie!! I originally wanted to see it because I am a big Benny Chan fan. Remember Heroic Duo and Gen X Cop? I thought they were awesome and so I thought I would check this one out too.

The movie is basically about three guys. Suen, an obsessive, manic, rundown cop, who cannot get over his girlfriend's sudden disappearance, which happened over 10 years ago. An assassin, who we meet in the beginning of the movie when he murders the guy chained to Seun and who seems to posses secret important info. And, the lawyer. a man who can get off any client, regardless of his crime, and who coincidentally happens to be married to a woman who looks exactly like Sean's missing girlfriend - which really messes with Sean! Anyway, this was one of those movies where I could not guess how it was going to end, and that is huge to me. It was so complex! All of the characters were so well developed, with such strong personalities that it made for a really intense dramatic, thriller, mystery, movie experience. The whole time I was trying to figure out where everything was going and I couldn't! So many films these days are so ridiculously obvious and formulaic, which is why I think it's important to step out of the mainstream on occasion. This movie is a great opportunity to do that!

Divergence is the latest crime thriller to come out of Hong Kong's film industry, and all films of this genre will nonetheless be compared with the grand-daddy of them all - Infernal Affairs, which set a very high bar. Given that this film is produced by the same team, you'd expect the same high standards. While production values are similar, I'd leave it to you to decide the end verdict.

If you're expecting a strong cops and robbers storyline, then you might be disappointed. This film is heavy on relationships between the characters, their degrees of separation, and their duality. Which may not be a bad thing, but I find the dwelling on sappy moments and flashbacks a bit overboard, and at times, the audience was laughing at the improbability of these moments.

This movie unites Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng together for the big screen after the comic fantasy movie Stormriders. Kwok plays a cop who lost his girlfriend under mysterious circumstances 10 years ago, and in the first 10 minutes, lost a key witness to a sniper, played by Daniel Wu, who always seem to be playing nothing but baddie roles these days. However, Wu's sniper character knows that in his career, he is both the hunter, and the hunted, and at times want to prove to Kwok that he makes a better cop. Ekin Cheng's a lawyer who defends the innocent, or so it seems. While he's aware that his clients are sometimes guilty, is he idly standing by? Thrown into the mix are characters like Cheng's wife, played by the lovely Angelica Lee, who bears a strong resemblance to Kwok's girl, and thus making him a stalker of sorts, Eric Tsang as an underused pathologist, Ning Jing (the only movie I saw her in was the remake of Shanghai Grand) as a bald assassin agent, and Lo Kar Leung as Cheng's client who has shady underworld links and a pop star son, who gets kidnapped.

At times you might feel that the movie plods along, while you might already have been able to unravel the mystery mid-way. This could be due to the sappy moments I mentioned earlier, and taking centerstage is how Kwok's cop character refuses to give up looking for his girlfriend. You can understand how the character feels if you're in the same shoes - loving someone so deeply, and yet having zero closure. And when you think you see her again - is it really her, or had amnesia played a part, or has she deliberately forgotten the past? While the audience found the scene of revelation and Kwok's reaction to it funny, I felt the opposite - sometimes when the truth is revealed and you can't handle it, you shut down. Really. Trust me, I know. So if I were in his shoes, that'll probably be what will happen to me too.

However, this film does have moments which can iconify it (sort of like the Tony-Leung-pointing-a-gun-at-Andy-Lau's-head moment in Infernal Affairs). The "long run to the fish market" scene is tense, and so is the finale where 3 characters have a standoff, which actually yanked the rug off my feet.

I felt that if this film focused tightly on the plot, and lose some peripheral characters, it might just live up to its potential, and I don't think we'll see any sequels to this one.

Not the slam bang police action of Infernal Affairs (the original, not the ripoff), but there is enough action to make it worth your while.

It focuses more on the characters and their relationships: the cop, Suen Siu Yan (Aaron Kwok, the hit man, Koo (Daniel Wu), and the lawyer, To Hou Sun (Ekin Cheng).

Suen has been looking for his girlfriend Amy for 10 years. To's wife Su Fong (Angelica Lee) looks like her and actually plays two parts, one in flashback. He acts like a stalker as he follows her everywhere.

Eric Tsang from Internal Affairs is here, but he is a cop in Missing Persons, not a mobster.

Kwok and Wu are great, and the action is good at times, but there just doesn't seem to be something that brings it all together.

Messy form over content police thriller (comedy?) has a cop, who is trying to come to terms with a long missing girlfriend, lose a witness in an organized crime case to an assassin. How the cop, the girlfriend and the assassins all interrelate is the film. I didn't know whether director Benny Chan was serious or not. Chan a good director (New Police Story) for the most part though occasionally he tries to do too much and the pieces don't come together (Rob B Hood). Here nothing seems to work and it all seems like a TV movie. The action isn't real, its done for artistic effect- the early strangulation where the victim claws the paint of the truck for example.Whats worse its laughable- the sequence where our hero finds the picture of his lost girl in his car and takes his foot off the brake while on a steep incline had me howling. Actually I just gave up on the film and jumped to the end. For me its one of the real disappointments I've seen recently, even if it does have a couple of good sequences-the plastic bag fight for example.

Divergence tells the story of three men: A reckless hit-man simply named Coke (Daniel Wu), Suen Siu-yan a police officer whose fiancée has been missing for 10 years (Aaron Kwok), and Barrister To, a lawyer (Ekin Cheng) who works for a mobster. While conducting a routine witness transfer Suen Siu-yan feels the wrath of the hit-man Coke, after barely escaping with his life he starts further investigation into the case, the prize being Barrister To's gangster boss. At this point, three seemingly unrelated lives converge into a hailstorm of bullets and bloodshed.

If it sounds like typical Hong Kong action flick thats because it is. Everything about this film, at a cursory glance, is typical. The Acting is well-done, and the cinematography and Direction is also good, and the action is good too. But there is still something lacking in Divergence. I had to watch this film twice to figure out what was missing. On the second viewing I figured it out. This movie has no heart. It has everything that makes a good action film but in the end, you just don't care about the characters. The film makes all the stops and covers all the bases, and it should be a great film. But sadly, it's not, I was hoping for a great gunkata thriller but I was sadly disappointed.