Despite an English title which makes it sound like a bad tabloid headline, Infernal Affairs is a snappy police thriller, not shy of energy or intelligence. Gorgeously made, the film is James Ellroy shot by Bruce Weber, a hauntingly made affair which moves with grace but barely wastes a minute of its muscular, refreshingly complex, screenplay.
Ming (Andy Lau) is a secret member of the triads who has infiltrated the police force. So far gone that he doesn't seem to stand a chance of ever cleaning up his act, Ming hides his duplicitous ways rather well and is being fast tracked for promotion. Meanwhile, Yan (Tony Leung) is a deep undercover cop who has been mixing with hoods for a decade and may have been permanently tainted by his associations with Hong Kong's criminal fraternity. After a drug deal goes askew, the triads boss Sam (Eric Tsang) becomes convinced that he has problems with an informer and instructs his boy Ming to use all the resources at his disposal to flush him out into the open.
Direct and efficient, Infernal Affairs is pared-down storytelling; successfully blurring the lines of morality to such a degree that pat categorisations are swept aside. Thanks to the fiercely hard boiled screenplay, which powers from one scene to the next, the actors have much material to work. Both Lau and Leung are confident in their roles adding a real sense of dimension to the picture. And though Infernal Affairs owes something of its sense of style to Michael Mann's superlative Heat (1995), this is an assured, clever cop thriller that shouldn't be missed.
