Perhaps one of the best side effects of the impoverishment of the Hong Kong film industry since the mid-90s has been the fact that Hong Kong filmmakers actually have to make thrillers rather than action movies. No longer able to accomplish John Woo style bullet ballet or Jackie Chan stunt spectacles on time and on budget, for once Hong Kong cinema had to focus on such aspects as characterization, suspense and thematic complexity.

In short, Hong Kong filmmakers discovered Noir: the dark, gritty style that defined low-budget American crime thrillers of the 40s and 50s. A term coined by French critics, it perfectly described not just the high contrast lighting that defined those movies, but also their unflinching depictions into the dark recesses and deep wounds of the human heart.

And oh boy, in The Stool Pigeon there’s plenty of those dark recesses to go around. Nick Cheung is Inspector Don Lee, a professional handler of stoolpigeons (also known as stoolies or informers): career criminals eager to rat undercover on their fellow men for the right price. The relationship between a handler and a stoolie is a dangerous and ambiguous one: both sides are out to gain the maximum leverage over each other, both sides will also necessarily put their lives on the lines for each other, and if they’re not careful, both sides may even become the closest of friends, the most dangerous relationship in a profession based on deceit and leverage. Don has himself witnessed the terrible cost of bringing criminals to justice using such methods, what with a former stoolie of his gone mad and now living out of cardboard boxes as a result of the trauma of his profession. And now he must get a son of a famous daredevil driver, Ghost Jr. (Nicholas Tse), whose skills at street racing make him an ideal getaway driver, to infiltrate the gang of Barbarian, a devious criminal who has long evaded justice, in exchange for his sister’s freedom from the bondage of a brothel. Barbarian is planning to commit a well-planned heist, from which he stands to make another clean getaway...but the Hong Kong police is eager to ensure that this time, he won’t.

What follows is a stellar example of a classic thriller the way Hollywood could make them once, but seems to have largely lost. There are footchases and car chases, all without superhuman stunts, remarkably enjoyable and easy to follow. There are suspenseful hair-breadth escapes and evasions, all executed with the precise timing of a Swiss watch. The spatial relationships between characters and action are superbly established in these scenes, and lend an especial air of credibility to the film’s action sequences, which are not self-contained setpieces that draw attention to themselves but function as extensions of the film’s plot and are firmly rooted in character development. Character development, in fact, is excellent. Especially memorable is a relationship between Ghost Jr. and gun moll Dee (Kwai Lun Mei). After a particularly well-done footchase they make out in a clothing stall in a bazaar. Their attraction is fierce and animalistic, and stems from a realm beyond the sexual; from a mutual recognition that they each share as wounded survivors for whom life has dealt a harsh hand, and a hunger for each other’s company stemming from the same.

Dante Lam’s other thrillers Beast Stalker and Fire of Conscience were skillful, well-crafted Noirs with excellent scripts that probably will be remade by Hollywood, and should also be studied in the meantime. Lam’s newest exercise improves upon Fire of Conscience in being both tighter, more thematically consistent, and in its final moments reaches that ideal height of fatalism, cynicism and world-weariness that defines Noir’s greatest secret: it is a genre for the greatest of romantics for all its claims to gritty realism, for only the greatest of romantics could see fate in such a grand gesture, as a pair of dice constantly turning up snake eyes for those playing it. That alone makes The Stoolpigeon a modern day Hong Kong Film Noir of the highest order. Whoever Hollywood picks to remake this will have to go some way to beat its overall impact.