A worthy successor to director Derek Yee’s One Night In Mongkok with a fantastic performance by Andy Lau, but a lack of true menace in the film stops this just short of being a classic…
The plight of the undercover cop has long been an obsession of Hong Kong movies. From Chow Yun-fat in City On Fire, to Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs, the conflicting moralities and loss of true self have obsessed filmmakers, striking a chord with the male kinship and honour-based prevalent in Chinese literature and society for centuries.
Derek Yee’s first step back into Hong Kong’s treacherous underworld since the universally acclaimed One Night In Mongkok echoes this long-running theme, with an edgily truthful depiction of the heroin trade in Hong Kong.
Nick (Daniel Wu, One Night In Mongkok, Purple Storm) is a special narcotics agent, having worked undercover for nearly eight years to bring down one of the major drug traffickers into Hong Kong. His lonely existence comes to an end when he has a brief affair with neighbour Jane (Zhang Jing Chu, Seven Swords, Rush Hour 3), a single mother who has become a drug addict. But soon her estranged husband returns with disastrous consequences.
As Nick becomes closer to his boss, known as ‘The Banker’ (Andy Lau, Infernal Affairs, House Of Flying Daggers), he finally gets close to his goal of becoming his protégé, but just how far will he go to bring the whole organisation down?
Following the bleak and frankly grim picture of Hong Kong painted by One Night In Mongkok, Protégé paints an honest exploration of the drugs trade and the ramifications for those involved in it, from dealers to addicts. The inspiration from research director Yee undertook for Mongkok, as he had enough material to make a second movie.
Indeed, it’s immersed in painstaking detail about the trade, origins and production, to the point where you almost feel you are watching an educational film – which admittedly to some extent is Yee’s intention. In part he wants to pass comment on the dealers, going on record as saying that ‘deserve to go hell and they will’. But then he can’t help but show us the process with the gloss of a cookery programme.
For the main part it’s an enthralling insight into this underworld, the squalor of Nick’s, and particularly his neighbour Jane’s existence cuts through any unintentional gloss, adding to the films realism. There’s a standout scene when other cops, unaware of Nick’s mission, attempt to use him to break raid the production house – cue a heart stopping escape climbing out of windows three storeys up! But this is not a action movie in the mode that we’ve come to expect of Hong Kong thrillers, nor does it contain a deliberate twist for thrilling narrative conclusions (we seem to have got through that phase).
With a strong ensemble cast that also includes Anita Yuen (He’s A Woman, She’s A Man) as Banker’s wife and Louis Koo (Election, Legend Of Zu) a world away from his usual suave role as Jane’s husband, the films success rests on our two leads, Lau and Wu.
Daniel Wu gives another well-rounded performance as the morally compromised Nick, but never truly convinces as man who has given up his real life and family to live this deception. It lacks the resonance and pure desperation of Chow Yun-fat or Tony Leung’s performances in their aforementioned roles. Perhaps that’s a weakness in the script co-written by Yee, we don’t truly feel what Nick has lost in order to get to this point. You don’t believe that he’s spent nearly a third of his life to get this close to the Banker, and can’t help but wonder why it’s taken so long anyway?
But it’s Andy Lau who really surprises. This part-time Canto pop star truly proves just how talented he is, donning the persona of the dealer with a teenage daughter who suffers from diabetes so well he is all but unrecognisable in his role. He physically deports himself so differently than what we’ve seen before.
However, again Yee’s script lets the film down. He spends such a lot of time making Lau’s character sympathetic and, more importantly, just an ordinary businessman with a wife and family, he forgets to show use just how dangerous he would need to have been to survive in this world for so long. It lacks that ‘Joe Pesci moment’, for want of a better comparison. That lack of menace undermines what should be one of the films most thrilling confrontations.
In many respects it’s Yee’s understandable stance on the drugs trade that starts to chip away at the films power, aiming towards a moral judgment that confuses the result, ultimately veering towards sentiment. In fact it was One Night In Mongkok’s lack of one that made it so successful and impressive a movie.
Despite its flaws, Protégé is still a worthy thriller, and an interesting direction in Hong Kong movies seeming move towards ‘ultra-realism’. Worth watching for Andy Lau alone…
The DVD of Protégé is released in the UK on 8 September 2008 by Liberation Entertainment.
