"Bomb Disposal Expert 2" was released less than half a month ago, and the film's box office and word-of-mouth were win-win, one of which was because the police film with neat, tough and strong Hong Kong local characteristics had long been missing the film market; the second was due to the performance of the lead actor Andy Lau, "Desperate Liu Lang" was sixty years old, still able to withstand high-intensity action scenes, and also played an "atypical policeman" convincingly. Pan Chengfeng, a bomb disposal expert who has experienced such a turbulent life trajectory as "hero-patient-saint", is another police detective role that Will become a classic detective created by Andy Lau after the "Thunder Tiger" of "The Biography of Inspector Leiluo" and Liu Jianming of "Infernal Affairs".
Andy Lau is known as the "industry labor model", which makes the films he has taken over are uneven, but a number of screen tough guys with different temperaments in the past 30 years, especially several famous police roles, have become the image of entering the history of Chinese films. This also outlines a curve of ups and downs and intriguing curves of Hong Kong police genre films over the past three decades.
Sunny and handsome, also police and bandit "Thunder Tiger"
In 1991, Andy Lau starred in "The Biography of Inspector Leiluo of 500 Million", playing the legendary Inspector Leiluo of Hong Kong Island at the end of british colonialism. In the 1950s and 1960s, the British people in Hong Kong were lazy and corrupt, and they let the Kowloon Walled City go unchecked, and the grievances of the people at the bottom boiled over. Relo came from a humble background and was originally a small police detective who had been suppressed by the lower echelons of the colonial government. Young and ambitious, he understands that the class he came from also took advantage of the folk grass recklessness, originated in the Kowloon City Walled, Linglong is active in black and white, united a group of low-level little brothers with righteousness, on the basis of the two systems of gangster love and clan blood, established and improved a set of police and bandit cooperation protection fee mechanism, personal wealth of more than half a billion, known as "Thunder Tiger". The title of "The Biography of Inspector Leiluo" is clear at a glance, but as a popular entertainment film, and with Andy Lau's sunny and handsome appearance at the time, the definition of "Leiluo" is still "police" rather than "bandit". The film does not avoid him eventually becoming a tyrant like the emperor of the earth, but it still emphasizes how a young man with nothing has the courage to achieve a class leap, and in the process of counterattacking, he cannot avoid blood staining his hands, but his heart is still open, and in the dense dramatic conflict, the affection between individuals and individuals masks the gears of money and power.
Wang Jing, who served as the supervising producer of "The Biography of Inspector Leiluo of Five Hundred Million", directed "Chasing the Dragon" in 2017, and still played Inspector Leiluo by Andy Lau, and after nearly 30 years, the young and elderly Leiluo made the core of this image complete in intertextuality. Leiluo's character is a typical green man in the popular narrative, as a policeman, it is Robin Hood who acts, and at the same time, in the special historical context of the collision of old and new in Hong Kong, China, he is an opportunist. However, the tyrant of good and evil is an embarrassing existence after all, and it is true that the independent commission against corruption was established after the British moved the truth, and at a deeper level, the evil desire and the realization process of evil will eventually engulf the individual and point to nothingness - the word "chasing the dragon" means an illusion in the Hong Kong dialect, and the dragon chaser is the follower of the illusion.
Endless tragedy, a fake cop who splits in the cracks
In the legend of the end of the century, Leiluo was a policeman who co-built with bandits, and in the "Infernal Affairs" at the beginning of this century, Andy Lau played Liu Jianming, a policeman who wanted to wash away the black history of bandits at all costs. When "Infernal Affairs" was filmed, the Kowloon City Walled City, which was mixed with fish and dragons, was a thing of the past, and after it was demolished, it became a landscape of jianghu legends. During the filming, director Liu Weiqiang moved the camera away from the hustle and bustle of the city, turned to the skyline of Hong Kong's cement forest, stood on the roof of a high-rise building, and the characters saw the sea and the sky, and the city was like a floating and rootless enclave. This is also Liu Jianming's situation. He was born a bandit, wanted to wash white and go ashore, be a policeman, be a good person, and run a decent life. He tries to sever his relationship with the native community, but time and time again, when he tries to gain the power of fate autonomy and actively bid farewell to the past, the memory of his old identity is haunted like a ghost. Liu Jianming's desire to go from "undercover gangster fake cop" to "real cop who is a good person" is his desire for a fixed identity and his desire for a new community identity. However, the tragedy of "endless fate" is that between the white and black paths of either one or the other, it is impossible for nirvana to return.
At the end of the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy, Liu Jianming and Yang Jinrong, played by Dawn, said to their mainland counterparts played by Chen Daoming before taking up their righteousness: "Some things always have to be done by someone. "What Officer Yang said, in a narrow sense, is to pick out criminals, seek justice for their sacrificed peers, and put them in a broader time horizon, which is a pursuit of order and return.
The inability to return to the system of individuals with bitter self-redemption
10 years after the release of "Infernal Affairs", in 2012's "Cold War", Andy Lau played the role of security chief Lu Minghua, who did not play much, but said the most important line of the whole film: "Can you understand the legal system and the spirit of the rule of law in Hong Kong, which is a core value that Hong Kong can become the safest city in Asia." At this point, the concepts of the rule of law, the rule of law, security, and core values have replaced the pre-modern tribal community identity. The establishment of order and the maintenance of order have replaced the arrogance of individualism.
"Bomb Disposal Expert 2" is a reconfirmation of this position. At the beginning of "Bomb Disposal Expert 2", Andy Lau plays Pan Chengfeng, a traditional hero of Gao Daquan, a dedicated, professional and sacrificial bomb disposal policeman, who is a staunch defender of the existing order in an orderly system. Even after a tragic accident caused him to lose a leg, he still returned to a state of "better than an able-bodied person" with extraordinary perseverance, eager to regain the most riveted screw in the system. Yet he was treated as a "sick man" and a "disabled person", squeezed out of the order to which he had belonged.
In Pan Chengfeng's story, when the separation of individuality and order progresses to the point of irreparability, the writers and directors create a "traumatic amnesia". The direction of the second half of the film is not so much a reconciliation between Pan Chengfeng and the system that abandoned him, but rather that he chooses the professional ethics and beliefs of the past in an empty consciousness, and the body itself chooses the professional ethics and beliefs of the past - to be a bomb disposal expert who protects others. The exploded Tsing Ma Bridge becomes a metaphor for sadness, Pan Chengfeng cannot return to the police system, he becomes a kind lone ghost, self-redemption eventually becomes a desolate gesture of embracing death, and the saintly lonely courage, if there is still value, then let the destroyed order return to its place.
Author: Liu Qing
Editor: Guo Chaohao