REVIEW: ‘Triangle’ (2007)

Hong Kong filmmakers Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To take turns helming this frequently confused yet well-shot and acted heist-gone-wrong movie starring Simon Yam, Louis Koo and Sun Hong-lei as three desperate men given one chance to make a fortune off a priceless stolen relic. Their plans are complicated by a corrupt police detective, a mentally unstable wife, several gangsters, and a series of increasingly improbable and darkly comic coincidences suggestive of a fable where fate and morality intertwine with the modern world.

TRIANGLE is an apt title for a movie that deals in threes in numerous ways. For starters, production was split into three parts with three Hong Kong filmmakers with similar yet very distinct styles directing their own portion. Tsui Hark oversees the first part which is also the most bewildering. It introduces enough pivotal characters and subplots for three movies. This includes the three would-be robbers. Then you have a mysterious stranger luring them into the heist of a gold-plated petticoat from the Tang Dynasty. Meanwhile, Koo’s character has three gangsters pressuring him to hire a getaway driver for some unrelated heist that never comes into play. In addition, there is a perplexing love triangle involving Yam’s character, his mentally disturbed wife (played by Kelly Lin), and Gordon Lam as a police detective who decides to make his own grab for the treasure.

Tsui is all over the place in scattered direction that emphasizes visual flair at the expense of clarity and character development. Lam fares better in the middle part by slowing down the pace of the film to focus on the interrelationship between key players while straightening out the narrative with a more direct and methodical approach. While this is an improvement, his fleshing out of the love triangle feels increasingly like an overly complicated diversion that might have worked well as the centerpiece of its own film but not so much here where the heist and the consequences of being involved should be the focal point.

Yam and Lin both enter “crazy” territory with their characters under Lam’s direction. Yam’s character remains fixated on his previous wife who died in a car accident and sees her reflected in his current wife. Lin’s character appears to be paranoid and delusional to the point where she goes from trying to have her lover kill her husband to trying to stab her lover to death in order to save herself when her tryst is uncovered.

Lam puts a lot of work into building up this mess of a dramatic situation, only to have Johnnie To toss it aside almost completely to focus on a lightly comical build up towards a stylish, PTU-like shootout between all parties. Along the way, Lin’s character and her schizoid behavior are all but dropped as she is reduced to following the boys around.

In capping the film, To takes the story off in a direction not seen earlier by toying with the characters and playing up the way they all intersect at the end to the point where he borders on parodying his own past work in films like THE MISSION and PTU. This is where one of To’s favorite character actors, Lam Suet, enters the picture with grossly over-the-top acting as a giggling and drugged out, epileptic conman who runs around in a rural area outside of Hong Kong with a bag full of ecstasy and a boom box cranking out trance music. While doing this, he lays road traps to pop the tires of passing cars and scams them into paying outrageous sums in order to fix their tires.

To’s segment also introduces the film’s only heroic character, a bicycling police officer, played by You Yong, who happens upon the standoff and ends up literally in the middle of a patented Johnnie To shootout.

As a complete film, TRIANGLE doesn’t hold up well. It’s too fractured, divergent and self indulgent to work despite efforts to produce a seamless narrative and downplay the points at which directors handed off control. Likewise, audiences unfamiliar with the past work of each director may not appreciate their distinctive styles as much when presented in this way.

As an experimental, collaborative effort by some of Hong Kong’s brightest, or in Tsui Hark’s case, once brightest filmmaking talents, the film is quite entertaining just to see what each director does with their portion of the story as they all play to their own distinctive strengths even when it isn’t always as successful as their previous films have been.

In all of this, the lead cast stands out with mostly fine performances, especially from Simon Yam. Within the Hong Kong film industry, Yam is the master of effective, understated performances and doesn’t disappoint despite having to work under revolving direction. Sun Hong-lei and You Yung, who both previously appeared in Ding Sheng’s underrated action drama THE UNDERDOG KNIGHT, also turn in good performances, while Louis Koo pretty much looks and acts the same way he does in all of his movies, which is fine when his shtick fits the role as it does here. At the other end of the spectrum are Lam Suet and Kelly Lin who reach for extremes with less than desirable results.

Production-wise, TRIANGLE looks and sounds great with sharp cinematography, tension-building editing hindered only by some scripting and directing missteps, and effective production design and scoring.

There is little to speak of regarding screen fighting although general action direction, as overseen by Chin Kar-lok, places great emphasis on realism, over more stylized violence that any of these three directors may have favored a decade or two earlier. Of the three, Johnnie To is unable to resist steering into this territory at the end but up to that point, screen scuffles look raw and unscripted. This realism in screen violence where accidents are common and no one looks particularly heroic is just as much of an art as making screen heroes perform flawless martial arts and gunplay action. In making You Yung’s late-entry supporting character the sharp-shooting, silent hero of the film, Johnnie To seemed to be making a statement in drawing such a strong contrast between this character and everyone else in the movie. While it’s fun to watch, unfortunately this contrast has the effect of further reducing the consistency in tone that the filmmakers’ try, yet ultimately fail to pull off with the finished product.

In watching this film and seeing these three filmmakers’ work side by side, I have come to three conclusions. First, Tsui Hark needs to stop directing altogether and stick to producing. Secondly, Ringo Lam should be directing more, preferably with more A-list dramatic actors like Simon Yam in the lead instead of B-list action stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Lastly, Johnnie To needs to be directing more mainstream, big-budget action films with even more emphasis on quirky characters, stylized elements and comedy. He’s already done enough weighty crime movies for one career and I sense in him a strong streak of dark comedic potential that needs to be explored more thoroughly than we’ve seen to date.