Clearing House in the Department

The problem with having a very tightly plotted, self-contained, well organized story is that the second you decide to expand outwards you have to come up with some reason for any continuation to exist. Infernal Affairs is that kind of story, a very twisty, but well organized and well put together, crime thriller that neatly and, some could argue, conclusively tells the story it set out to tell. It comes in, does its job, and does it all very efficiently, to the point that anyone that enjoyed the first film might sit there going, “do we really need a sequel?”

The creators first neatly tried to elide that consideration by doing a prequel instead of a sequel. Infernal Affairs II says, in essence, “we know how the story ends, so let’s go back to the beginning and see how it all begins.” It works only because it moves the focus away from the main protagonists of the first film and shifts it over to their superiors, side-stepping complaints of filling in unnecessary backstory largely by focusing on other backstory that could actually use fleshing out. It’s a solid trick, and while I don’t feel like the prequel is perfect by any means, it’s about as good a prequel as you could hope to get.

Now we get to the next film, a semi-prequel, sort-of sequel, Infernal Affairs III and, honestly it feels like the wheels are really starting to come off the cart. The film feels like it was primarily designed to tie up one loose end: what happens to the one person that didn’t get their comeuppance in the first film. Beyond that, the film spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, moving and and around the previous stories we already know to fill in little details and spin out new moments that are supposed to inform us of what happened in scenes we didn’t see before. But it’s all so messy, and so poorly organized that the end result is a far cry from the tight, strong, solidly contained storytelling of the first film. This is a prequel/sequel desperately looking for a reason to exist.

The film is primarily about Senior Inspector Lau Kin-Ming (Andy Lau), the former mole in the police department that had been working for Hon Sam until, late in that film Law killed Hon to clean up the whole mess and try to put the whole criminal enterprise to rest. Months later, Lau is back at work, serving in an administrative position until the investigation around the death of undercover cop Chan Wing-Yan (Tony Leung). Lau is cleared, with the investigation finding no reason to doubt Lau’s story (even though we have every reason to doubt it), and Lau is cleared to return as the lead of Internal Investigations.

But Lau is still haunted by the things he did for Hon. The past follows him like a ghost, and everywhere he turns he sees things that remind him of Chan’s case. Worse, it seems that someone else on the force, Superintendent Yeung Kam-Wing (Leon Lai), is following the threads, searching for Lau, presumably because they’re also a mole working for a crime boss and they need to clear out everyone else. Bodies are falling, former moles are dying, and Lau feels the noose tightening around his neck. He’ll have to take extreme measures to drag Yeung out of the shadows and expose all he’s done before Yeung is able to do the same.

There’s a core idea to Infernal Affairs III that I do like. Because Lau doesn’t face justice at the end of the first film (unlike in its remake, The Departed), the film leaves itself feeling slightly unfinished. A certain reading could say that Lau got away with it, showing that justice is blind and, with a criminal still on the streets, the whole system will self-perpetuate. But most viewers probably wanted Lau to face some kind of justice, and they’re the ones this film is effectively designed for. That’s what this film tries to tackle, inefficiently, and I think the core idea of Lau investigating someone that’s investigating him is a solid idea.

From a certain perspective it could work. It could give us a new cat-and-mouse game like the dynamic between Lau and Chan in the first film as each is trying to search out the other and both are circling around, tightening towards each other as the gravity of the situation draws them in. A film that focused on that dynamic, that really played up Lau’s game against a new opponent, could have been really interesting. Unfortunately Infernal Affairs III isn’t that kind of film and it doesn’t put nearly enough focus on that story as it should have.

Instead, much of the meat of the film is another prequel to Infernal Affairs, taking us into the days and months before Lau shot Chan, exploring events we’d never seen before so that characters that were introduced in this film. Like Yeung, can suddenly have attachment to previous events they weren’t part of in the first film. It’s like the movie is desperate to say that everyone we’re watching was part of the original story, you just didn’t know it because they were off screen. It’s like the creators feel like the only way a character can have weight is if they were somehow involved in the first Infernal Affairs.

On the one hand this does give us more time with Leung as Chan, and his performance is just as effortlessly solid and charismatic as in the first movie. I like this character and I do appreciate seeing more of him, but the film doesn’t really have much it can do with the character. His arc his over, and while the prequel Infernal Affairs II could justify delving more into his character by going much farther back in his story, Infernal Affairs III is hampered by the fact that we know where the character ends and we know that nothing we’re seeing in this new film changes anything about his character at all. It’s all filler, padding out scenes and interactions that the previous film left as subtext, all because the film can’t think of anything else to do with him.

This comes at the expense of Yeung’s character. He’s the new foe for Lau, the guy circling around our criminal cop, and he should have weight and substance to him. But the film never finds focus for the character, always keeping him on the periphery without exploring his own story. The film does this so it can play bait and switch with us, making us think he’s a villain until (spoilers for a 23 year old movie) it reveals that he’s actually a good guy, and his investigation of Lau was on the up and up. The film doesn’t have anything to say about him besides, “yeah, he was a good cop all along,” which drains all the tension from his story,

What the film reveals, through its weird, twisting narrative that bounces back and forth along the timeline, is that Yeung was working with another operative deep in the Triads, and once they realized that Chan was also an operative working for the Triads, they all developed a close friendship. Chan’s death spurred Yeung to focus on Lau, the man that killed him, so that he could bring Lau to justice. But the movie doesn’t tell this from Yeung’s perspective; it tells it from Chan’s perspective instead, which leaves the narrative feeling weirdly weightless and hollow.

Instead, the movie should have skipped all the flashbacks, even though it would have meant not bringing Leung back. The story of Yeung working with a shadowy figure should be a plotline sent in the present, with Lau investigating, trying to prove Yeung is dirty, before it’s revealed that both he and his shadowing figure (called "Shadow" in the film and played by Chen Daoming) were really closing in on him all along. Ninety minutes of that, without all the Quentin Tarantino-style time shifting, would have better served the story and made for a much tighter narrative all around.

In the end, then, what we have is a core story that is interesting, mired under an hour or more of unnecessary padding. Moments in Infernal Affairs III do work, but the whole is so messy, and so unfocused, that it’s hard to get invested in anything the film is trying to show up. The creators – director Andrew Lau, writer / director Alan Mak, and writer Felix Chong – clearly have deep love for the characters and weren’t ready to let any of them go. But their attachment sinks an otherwise interesting story, and it leads to easily the weakest entry of the film series. The trilogy could have had a climactic send off. Instead it got this messy conclusion.