No, it’s not about relations with in-laws. Rather, this is a 2002 Hong Kong movie that I became aware of only recently. Following the pattern of “John Walker’s Reading List”, what matters is when we see it, not when it was first presented.
I am generally interested in movie backgrounds – and the Hong Kong which forms the backdrop to this movie was a fairly happening place even a quarter of a century ago. Wealth and success attract crime – in this case, a rising mobster with big plans. Ten years ago, he dispatched a group of his young mob recruits to join the police, as part of a long-range plan to protect himself from the police. Now, ten years later, one of those mobster moles has risen in the police and has been assigned to the police team trying to shut down the mob boss’s drug business. At last, that mole can do what the mob boss sent him to do.
However, a far-sighted police leader had secretly set up an analogous plan years earlier, sending out a lone young undercover cop to infiltrate the crime world. As his years of undercover work have passed, this reluctant criminal has now become a trusted lieutenant of the mob boss.
Events now lead both the police leader and the mob boss to suspect they have informers in their midst. The strain on the two moles living false lives increases as both sides try to identify them – the mobster living as an apparently upstanding police detective, and the honest undercover cop illegally involved in a mob’s criminal activity. The movie revolves around the murky issue of good and evil in such a conflicted world. It is a quite compelling drama – worth watching.
