Filling In the Past of the Case

Having watched the first Infernal Affairs recently (it was suggested to me by HBO Max), naturally I was curious about the other two films in the saga. The first film is a tight and self-contained story, coming in at just over one hundred minutes and giving us everything we need to know about the double-crossing double-agents of the Hong Kong Police. It’s great. It’s so good that multiple remakes of the film have been made, including The Departed, which added a lot of extra character development but, for the most part, stuck directly to the story of the original film.

Watching the first Infernal Affairs, I was curious as to where the movies could even go from here. While the ending of The Departed is more conclusive than the ending of Infernal Affairs (spoiler: every major character dies), it didn’t feel like there was much we could really learn beyond that in a sequel. Which, apparently, the creators realized as well. Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, and written by Felix Chong and Alan Mak, the second film in the series (which was released one year after the first) doesn’t even bother moving forward with the story. Instead it goes back to the early days for the characters, when our main characters from the first film were still in the academy, so we can see how their whole mess began.

Normally I’d hate a prequel like this. We already know their story so why should we go back a few years to see the early days of their lives? Everything we needed to know about them was already conveyed in the previous film. What more is there to learn? But the prequel takes things in a different direction. While it’s true that the original main characters are in this film (played by their younger actors), the story isn’t really about them. It’s about the people they worked with, their handlers and superiors, back when they were first starting out on their own quest to try and stop the organized crime families in Hong Kong. And by distancing the story from the original plotline from the first film, this sequel finds a throughline that actually works.

Starting in 1991, we see a version of events we kind of knew already. Lau Kin-ming (Edison Chen) enters into the police academy at the behest of low-level crime boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang) and his wife, Mary (Carina Lau). Meanwhile, Chan Wing-yan (Shawn Yue) is transferred from the academy to an undercover position with the Hong Kong police force so he can work for his half-brother, Francis Ng as Ngai Wing-hau, the head of the family's Triad empire. The hope is that Chan can compile all the information on Ngai’s dealings so the police can bring the family down.

The case is headed by Wong Chi-shing (Anthony Wong) and his partner, Luk Kai-cheung (Hu Jun), and their goal is to stop all the crime families. However, they are pragmatic and realize that any change of the guard would create a power vacuum. They’re willing to work with Hon Sam to help bring down the Ngai family, with the understanding that Hon would then try to be a better kind of crime boss than the Ngais. That’s wishful thinking, though, and as the Ngai works to remove all his enemies, perceived or otherwise, bodies start dropping and blood starts flowing, leading to a far more violent Hong Kong than any of them wanted.

The interesting thing about Infernal Affairs II is that despite it featuring both Lau and Chan in supporting roles (as played by the younger actors that first portrayed the characters in flashbacks in the original films), they really aren’t the stars of the film. They are essentially backup characters to the main characters: Wong, Han, and Ngai. And while the original film made it pretty clear that Hon was in charge of Hong Kong’s criminal underbelly, this film fleshes that out and shows us the situation was far more nuanced and quite tenuous a decade before the main events of the first film.

What I liked best in this film was the dynamic between Wong and Hon. You can tell each of them has respect for the other. They’re on opposite sides of the law, and they know that on any given day their relationship could turn sour and they’d be fighting against each other instead of working towards a common goal. Despite this, though, they feel like friends, a couple of guys that know each other and like hanging out together, even though it will all fall apart eventually. It’s a dynamic I didn’t expect, but it adds much needed shading and nuance to these two, making them far more compelling in the process.

With that said, the other criminals in the film feel woefully underdeveloped. The Ngai family, led by Wing-hau, should be our main villains. We should fear them while they also grab our interest and make us want to root for them. But here, Wing-hau feels like little more than a stuffed shirt. The actor, Ng, isn’t as charismatic as you’d want, and he fails to capture the screen. He’s one of many characters in what feels like an overstuffed first act, and while the script makes it seem like he’s all powerful and can do anything to his enemies, you don’t get that sense from the character as presented on screen. He seems like a guy playing dress up at being a criminal instead of a properly groomed, well put together, crime boss. It doesn’t add up.

There are underboss characters in the film that are interesting to watch, mind you. The Ngai family has five underbosses under them, including Hon. The other four – Henry Fong as Gandhi, Peter Ngor as Negro, Arthur Wong as Kwok-wah, and Teddy Chan as Man-ching – are fairly fun, colorful characters who certainly bring needed life to the few scenes they’re in. Unfortunately, due to the machinations of the story, these four are killed off at the end of the first act and the movie never reclaims their energy for the rest of the film. Their deaths suck the fun out of the movie.

In their place we get a lot of people acting serious about the work they have to do. No one is more dreadfully serious (and boring, I’d note) than Lau and Chan. Our main characters from the first film are awkwardly shoved in here and it feels like the movie includes them simply because they were in the previous movie. While having them cameo would be one thing, both of them get extended time on screen, with B-plots that don’t go anywhere and that barely contribute to the main meat of the story. You could remove almost all their scenes entirely and the film would be better for it. Fast, leaner, with less time spent on characters that can’t really move forward because we know their storylines happen elsewhere. That’s the issue with prequels: when they’re set against events we already know, there’s only so much forward movement that can be done.

I’d go so far as to say that if the film were just about Lau and Chan it wouldn’t work. They aren’t interesting here, and that’s for a reason. But the film really cares more about their bosses and all the men pulling the strings, and at times it really works. It’s interesting to see the two sides working against the Ngai family while low level players in both the criminal world and in the police force slowly rise up the ranks. I liked how the sequel, for the most part, distanced itself from the first film to tell something new with some characters we were familiar with. It fleshes them out in interesting ways without feeling completely pointless.

Infernal Affairs II is a prequel that very nearly justifies its existence. It has some awkward storytelling around the original lead characters from the first film, but any time it can focus on its own story, with the new main players of this prequel tale, it finds the life it needs to be interesting. It’s not flawless, and could have used a better actor in the central villain role, but for a prequel that really didn’t need telling, Infernal Affairs II just about made me think not every prequel is a waste of time. And that alone is a huge accomplishment.