Review Of Kelvin Tong's RULE #1
Rule #1 is Kelvin Tong's most polished effort yet. Being a Singaporean making a film in Hong Kong and using actors and crew from both countries, Tong has made somewhat of a hybrid film, with locations and settings looking of ambiguous origins.
This is the film that's probably going to launch him into the big time proper, what with Shawn Yue and Ekin Cheng in the lead roles. It is a kind of cross between Taiwanese films Silk and Double Vision, with a dash of The Frighteners. It's gorgeously shot by cinematographer Keung Kwok Man, who lensedTsui Hark's The Blade and Seven Swords, and Derek Yee's One Nite In Mongkok and Protege.
Rule #1 is a supernatural thriller about a young cop, Sgt Lee (Yue) who has a near-fatal encounter with a vicious serial killer, during which he is convinced that he witnessed a ghostly occurrence. He puts that in his incident report which causes him to be transferred to the mysterious Miscellaneous Affairs Department (MAD).
MAD is basically a two-man special police unit that handles cases of supernatural nature. The boss there, Inspector Wong (Cheng), tells Lee that the number one rule to remember is that there are no ghosts in this world. But as things progress for Lee, he notices that most of their cases seem to be genuine hauntings, and that Wong seems to be lying about everything. Then a series of suicides begin, and as Lee delves deeper, he begins to retreat further into himself, neglecting his home and girlfriend (Fiona Xie).
Rule #1 starts off very interestingly, with a long, drawn-out but very intense sequence in a car park. But by the halfway point, the story takes a turn that requires a huge suspension of disbelief by the audience. But if you're willing to go along for the ride, the film can be somewhat rewarding. There are some great ideas, like the truly creepy screaming swimming pool. But it's the characters and the occasional effective humour that are really the winning points of the film, as the scares are pretty much standard fare (long hair, sudden loud jolts, etc). While the entire story rests on the theme of assumptions and that what you see and hear is not always the truth, it also basically revolves around men who are having women problems. What Tong presents is a very dark, very bleak, very depressing men's world, where sometimes the most sincere effort to connect can prove disastrous. At times, the film might be regarded as somewhat morally confused, but the big twist at the end (could anyone possibly NOT expect a twist or two in a movie like this?) justifies much of what went before.
And for once, Shawn Yue is a real delight to watch. The guy's definitely got acting chops and he gets to show them off in big chunks here.
