Review: OVERHEARD
One thing is made abundantly clear from Alan Mak and Felix Chong's new film, OVERHEARD – being a cop sucks. Sure you get to carry a gun but you work long hours in a high stress environment within an almost militaristic chain of command. Living your job and sacrificing relationships for a lousy salary in the hope of chasing down scumbags living the good life on dirty money can be demoralising for even the most optimistic of coppers and takes all the fun out of crime-fighting.
It's hardly surprising that when the opportunity comes along for surveillance operatives Johnnie (Lau Ching Wan), Max (Daniel Wu) and Gene (Louis Koo) to make a few bucks on the stock market, they only momentarily baulk at the fact that their information was gleaned from eavesdropping the insider traders they are out to bust. Max has an over-protective father-in-law to appease, Gene has a wife and three kids to support, one of whom has leukaemia, and while Johnnie may live on his own, he's been banging his partner's wife (Zhang Jingchu) for some time now and is thinking seriously about making a commitment. All of this is going to cost our three protagonists far more than their paltry cop's paychecks can stretch to.
OVERHEARD opens well as the trio set about their target, E&T's offices, installing bugs and hidden cameras. It is taut and suspenseful and promises much for the rest of the movie. And at times the film does deliver, it is occasionally tense, exciting, and even funny, proving that the directors do have the talent and know-how for exactly this kind of project. However the story never really gets out of first gear.
The setup is good and the characters are at least interesting. Admittedly Daniel Wu pretty much evaporates in the second half but Louis Koo has a meaty if typically melodramatic role, while Lau Ching Wan is the classic down at heel cop, committed to the job at the expense of everything else, except for an affair he definitely should not be having. Alex Fong puts in a decent turn as Johnnie's partner, Kelvin and we see the welcome return of Michael Wong, camping it up as the villainous CEO of E&T.
That said, the characters don't get much time to pause and consider the ramifications of their actions, nor does the film pull any surprises along the way. Quite simply, the crime committed is not nearly daring, dastardly or even interesting enough to demand such lofty dramatic pretensions, while the ramifications are predictable and underwhelming. Blame has to lie with Mak and Chong for going ahead with what is clearly an under-developed screenplay. There were so many interesting directions the writer/director pair could have taken this tale, but instead play it straight down the line, as quickly, economically and unadventurously as possible.
Any set piece passing itself off as intelligent moviemaking where a speech by one character on the importance of good communication to ensure the success of shared goals, is inter-cut with an actual sequence where characters' phones stop working and their partners are put into danger because of it is clumsy, lazy high school story-telling and plain embarrassing for such a high-profile production.
Some blame Andrew Lau's departure from this creative team as the end of the good times, but the rot set in when he was very much still on board. Derek Yee is involved this time out, but even he can't help matters, save for securing a heavyweight A-list cast who should be demanding better material. After INFERNAL AFFAIRS III, CONFESSION OF PAIN, LADY COP & PAPA CROOK and now this, one has to start asking whether Alan Mak and Felix Chong were ever really all that good to begin with or were the first two INFERNAL AFFAIRS films just happy accidents rather than the jubilant salutation of a new creative force in Hong Kong Cinema that we all had hoped they were.
