Mad Detective

You know those signs, “You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps”? That should be the motto for the Hong Kong police department, if this exhilaratingly daffy thriller is anything to go by.

The first time we see Inspector Bun (Ching Wan Lau) he’s giving multiple-stab wounds to a hanging slab of meat. The second time, he crawls up inside a suitcase and instructs a junior colleague to kick him down several flights of stairs. When he reemerges he announces the identity of the killer. (“The ice cream seller,” as it happens.)

His technique – if it can be called that – involves identifying with the victim to the point that the guilty party is revealed to him. It’s unorthodox, but it seems to work. “Don’t use logic to investigate,” he says. “Use your feelings.”

A tad short on impulse control, Bun goes too far when he chops off his ear as a retirement gift to a senior officer. A few years later Inspector Ho (Andy On) looks him up to ask for his assistance. A cop has been missing for months, and ballistics show his gun has been involved in two robberies, one of which ended in murder. The case has gone cold, but Ho remembers Bun from the old days, maybe he could help from the sidelines?

It’s somewhere around here that things start to get really strange. Bun has a fight with his wife about it – but the editing is off, as if co-directors Johnnie To (Election; Exiled) and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Ka-Fai Wai didn’t have all the coverage they needed. (Later, the real reason becomes clear.) Then Bun starts to trail the obvious suspect – the missing cop’s partner. But in some shots he seems to be watching not one man, but seven (including one woman), who walk and whistle in unison. “I can see the inner-person,” Bun explains. The suspect suffers from seven split personalities, and he sees them all.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood daring to take this idea and play it straight – Tony Scott in Déjà vu mode might have some fun with it, but I doubt even he would push it to the extremes that To and Wai have here.

I say “play it straight”, and on one level this is a psychological suspense thriller, complete with all the action, chase and shootouts you would expect. But it’s also a wild comedy about a crazy cop, and it’s a technical experiment with contrasting point- of-view shots altering our perception of almost every scene: there’s the world as Bun sees it, and then there’s the world everyone else recognises.

Crucially, it’s not just a movie about a detective with second sight. As Ho soon realizes, Bun really is a lunatic. (It’s a nice touch that Lau plays him with a bandaged head through the second half of the picture.) Yet there are moments when his vision seems no crazier than anyone else’s.

Granted, the case under investigation is disappointingly routine – maybe the filmmakers figured the movie was confusing enough without pressing the whodunit aspect. They may be right at that. If you’re after offbeat thrills and something different Mad Detective more than qualifies. Lau is terrific in the lead role, and while this constitutes a change of pace for Johnny To, it’s more proof of his virtuoso talent for re-jigging genre movies to astonishing effect.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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