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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh: Following The Money

Published Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:54:04 -0600

I originally wanted to name this week's column "It's the Economy, Stupid", but thought it might have sounded like I'm insulting the readers.

In movies and TV, financial thrillers are few and far between. This is because producers and development executives (understandably) assume that the majority of the public doesn't understand finances and economics, which are abstract and take too much time to explain, not to mention not very visual or cinematic. This is ironic considering how and why every movie and TV show made is driven by economic and financial motives. It's also the motive of most of the characters in crime dramas. You could say the world economy is in trouble now because our lack of understanding as enabled corrupt bankers to game the system and land us all in the current mess while they enriched themselves.

With the Occupy Movement and anger towards the financial sector still rising, you'd think Hollywood might try to develop more movies to capitalise on that, but studios have been wary about movies that remind Americans that they're in debt and everything is shit, especially since WALL STREET 2 bombed. It didn't matter that WALL STREET 2's scenario was already two, three years out of date by the time it opened, or that the script had a long list of other problems, including an unearned and sentimental happy ending that many people blamed for its failure. The bottom line is it bombed and nothing else turns a studio off a genre more than loss of money.

Leave it to Asian movies to get the 21st Century financial thriller right. I'm always impressed by how close to the zeitgeist Asian pop fiction keeps its ear without irony or the type of self-consciousness that has Hollywood scripts overthinking stories to death. Alan Mak and Felix Chong, the writers of the original INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and Johnny To have spent the last few years trying to give the thriller a new shine and polish to keep it relevant.

Mak and Chong's OVERHEARD 2 has been a respectable hit in Asia, which puts paid to Hollywood's recent unsuccessful attempts in the genre. A sequel in name only, OVERHEARD 2 has a completely new standalone story and characters, keeping only first movie's basic premise involving crime, surveillance and cops, and the lead actors (whose names helped secure production funding), this time set in the world of insider trading and financial crime. Lau Ching Wan, one of the finest Hong Kong actors of his generation, plays a stockbroker who's in over his head, under investigation by the authorities, pressure from the powerful men he serves and bugged by a mysterious third party. Daniel Wu is the mysterious third party, a surveillance expert with military training whose agenda might be deeper than just blackmail and getting rich. The permanently-tanned Louis Koo is the straight-arrow cop out to unravel what Lau and Wu are up to.

Despite its bright, widescreen surface, OVERHEARD 2 sits as comfortably in Noir territory as INFERNAL AFFAIRS did. Lau's stockbroker is a fundamentally decent man who has done things that are now coming back to bite him in the ass, and finds himself trapped by loyalty and threats from the men he answers to. Wu's operative occupies a grey area between hero and villain as his motives are slowly revealed. Even Koo's cop is flawed, his reputation tainted from his wife getting caught embezzling her law clients and his having to personally arrest her. The real bad guys are the cabal of old men who have a stranglehold on the Hong Kong stock exchange, controlling what stocks and companies get to live or die on their whim, rich off decades of insider dealing when they first get together to stop foreign companies from buying up and ruining local businesses, and for whom hiring killers is as easy as ordering take-out. The script does end up exposition-heavy because it wants to teach its audience the mechanics of stocks and insider dealing, a special subject considering how many Hong Kong and Chinese people play the market. Still, it manages to have the kind of twisty plot that Hollywood used to be more confident at creating, with room for action sequences as icing for the infodump, the latter of which is as good a mission as ever.

Johnny To's LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE takes a more traditional route with its plot about a banker, a non-too-bright gangster (Lau Ching Wan here again) and a cop on the trail of a bag of stolen money. What gives the plot its charge is why they want the cash: it's not just greed, but to pay off debts, save a friend or have enough money to buy a new house for the wife. The ubiquitous sense of a whole society of people under the weight of debt is what reflects the present, of course, and how the pursuit of cash leads to all kinds of bad things happening is a plot that never gets old.

The thing is, the financial thriller goes all the way back to the Silent era, with Marcel L'Herbier's Expressionistic adaptation of Emile Zola's L'ARGENT (now out on a lavish UK DVD from Eureka) all the way to Alan Pakula's underrated ROLLOVER starring Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson, itself hardly a hit at the box office and now earning some belated respect. Oliver Stone's first WALL STREET was an emblematic 80s movie. There's always going to be a movie about finance as long as movies are made. They're a minority, but a tradition nonetheless.

OVERHEARD 2 and LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE have not been released in the West but can be ordered from Yesasia.com.

Hiding the money under the bed at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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