Movie Review: 竊聽風雲 - Overheard (Rating: 4/5)

The story is about how three police intelligence officers got caught up in a stock insider-trading case. Initially, it was just about making money in the stock market illegally with insider information, but the situation quickly turns way out of hand, and the consequences were much more serious than any of them have expected.

The movie is directed by 麥兆輝 (Alan Mak) and 莊文強 (Felix Chong). Alan was responsible for the script in 無間道 (Internal Affairs), so I was really expecting the script in this movie to be (at least) as great as Internal Affairs, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The movie starts off with the three main characters, played by 劉青雲 (Lau Ching-wan), 古天樂 (Louis Koo), 吳彥祖 (Daniel Wu), setting up the “bugs” (electronic ear-dropping devices) in the suspect’s office. Although it wasn’t as cool (or exaggerated) as Tom Cruise breaking into the CIA database room in Mission Impossible, the script did a good job setting up the atmosphere, so you are already engaged in the first five minutes of the movie. And as the movie continues, there are enough twists and turns to keep you interested to find out what will happen next.

In my view, the movie does not really have a climax and it is hard to pick any special outstanding scenes or moments. It sounds like a weakness but it isn’t. On the contrary, every pieces of this movie functions so good together as a whole. There are no non-sense comedy scenes or dialogues, no extra romantic relationships. Every scenes or shots have a purpose, and everything is just focused on the story. I mean, nowadays, it is hard to find a Hong Kong movie to be this kind of professionally scripted and filmed.

Regarding to the three lead actors, each of their characters has very different background, and some of them are pretty complicated. But thanks to the great script, you can understand all their backgrounds in details during the first fifteen minutes of the movie. In terms of performance, Lau was the best as expected. Louis was pretty good and he provided some funny scenes, which I think they work well. But finally, Daniel was the one (I believe) who needs improvement. Given the desperate situation of his character, I was expecting something more than one single facial expression throughout the whole movie.

Now onto the weakness of the movie. First of all, it mentions about people can tap into your mobile phone even when your phone is turned off. The first time I heard about this idea was in another foreign movie Eagle Eye, and it really sounds like science fiction to me. I am no expert on electronic surveillance systems, so I would be really grateful if anyone can actually tell me this is possible in today’s technology.

Second weakness of the movie is 王敏德 (Michael Wong). He is totally not convincing in playing the role of the big bad boss. He had no different facial expressions at all, between the scene he was going to throw someone off the car, and the one he was giving a speech at a charity ball. Perhaps it was hard enough for him to speak his dialogues in Chinese, so he could not handle anything else. But I would expect a big boss to be more dark and evil, rather than just a talking robot.

In a word, although this movie may not have any climax or the ending wasn’t completely logical, the outstanding script and the terrific directing really set this movie apart from a lot of the other Hong Kong movies. For several well-known reasons, there are not many Hong Kong movies that are worth the effort to watch in a theatre. But this movie is definitely worth it, and if you are going to see just one Hong Kong movie in the theatre this summer, this is the one you should go for.