Fridae

The economic downturn has started hitting the film industry, and its effects can be seen in Dante Lam’s latest action film. Whereas a few years ago, the director and his colleagues made crime thrillers littered with convoluted and expensively choreographed 10-minute fights, the trend is towards the sparse and realistic. Explosions, if and when they take place, are more contained. Fights, if they occur, are quickly and decisively concluded. Screenplays are far less flashy and operatic, as though Infernal Affairs never happened. And that is a good thing.

Fire of conscience is probably the first real post-crisis cop thriller, and pays far more attention to story and atmosphere than you’d expect from its trailer.

Leon Lai and Richie Ren are street hardened cops from the opposite ends of the social spectrum, both united by their victimisation by a bureaucracy whose opaque and arbitrary rules seem to protect the organisation’s mistakes and weakness more than the welfare of its officers. Yet one is a good cop and the other a bad cop, and both engage in a huge battle where apprehending common criminals and taking on routine police cases are secondary – and may even serve as pawns – in their mutual battle with the system.

Dante Lam’s screenplay proves its strength easily: the audience begin their journey with a set of procedural cases, so open and shut that the deeper games that are at play between the principal characters almost appear invisible. The moral and personal conflict develops through a steady drip of tiny ‘reveals’ that give the audience enough information to understand that something is afoot, but not precisely what.

As far as the genre goes, Dante’s scripting and direction in Fire of Conscience seems to have better payoffs stylistically, is more disciplined scriptwise, and feels far more emotionally real than say Johnnie Toh’s productions. And that to me is evidence of an improvement in the sometimes stagnant Hong Kong film genre.