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The Overheard Trilogy: The Best Thrillers You Haven't Seen – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 09 Feb 2015 14:30:39 -0600

Adi Tantimedh writes,

We tend to take thrillers for granted.

They're our go-to for fictional escapism, but the best ones tend to offer a look into how the world works, reflect our current reality, even become social documents of their time. Hong Kong thrillers have always been part of their time, but where we previously took them for being more about the most elaborate and crazy action scenes and martial arts fights, some of them have crossed into a more sophisticated place, like the Overheard movies.

The three movies are connected more by theme rather than continuity. Each movie has a different setting and set of characters but keeps the same three A-List actors – Lau Ching Wan, Louis Koo and Daniel Wu – playing a completely new character in each movie. What links the movies are themes of electronic surveillance, finance, and crime from both sides of the law.

The first Overheard, released in 2009, was about three cops from the Hong Kong Police Force Commercial Crime Bureau assigned to gather intel on a financial trading company suspected of insider dealing and corruption. They use bugs and cameras, tap his phone and communications, and when they overhear a tip about a stock that's going to rise the next day, their own flaws and needs take over and they decide to take advantage of the insider tip to make a killing on the stock market to pay their debts, family medical bills and so on. As in all noir thrillers, this one act sets in motion their downfall as they now have to cover up their crime, which leads to an escalating series of twists and turns as fate closes in on all of them, especially when the mobbed-up head of the finance company finds out about them. It was a tight little noir thriller that reflected the desperation for cash in Hong Kong and the fear of losing out.

Overheard 2, released in 2011, takes place in a slightly different context. Here, Lau Ching Wan plays a stockbroker handling a corrupt syndicate's dodgy portfolio who finds himself being bugged and tracked by a surveillance expert played by Daniel Wu, whose use of explosives in public places gets the attention of the top cop from the Security Bureau played by Louis Koo.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSySMnGBkdI[/youtube]

The second movie is probably the best of the three, with the three main characters slowly becoming united when the real bad guys – the financial syndicate and their head – are revealed. What sets the movie apart is the complexity of the three leads and their arcs: Lau becoming increasingly morally-conflicted as he deals with the syndicate while fearing for his life, Wu as the cocky rogue intelligence operative looking to blackmail the syndicate, and Koo as the straight-arrow cop under pressure both to close the case and the strain on his marriage after he busted his wife for corruption. There's also social commentary about how money-obsessed people in Hong Kong and a primer in how the stock market and shorting works. The syndicate is a stand-in for cabals of old men who have manipulated the stock market for generations and even manipulated the course of history over the decades.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giXnfPgShaM[/youtube]

Overheard 3, released late last year, is even more ambitious than the last two entries in the series. This time, it's about real estate, the encroachment of Mainland Chinese money into Hong Kong, and the disenfranchisement of working class people when their land is taken from them. Louis Koo is an ex-con who teams up with fellow ex-con surveillance expert Daniel Wu to go after the gangster played by Lau Ching Wan, who is trying to make a killing in a land sale in the New Territories, if only the gangs and the families who own the land can be brought to bear, whether through intimidation or even killings. The cast is bigger, as are the setpieces, and the sense of corruption is even more pervasive this time. There's a sense of Hong Kong going to hell. And once again, it's down to greed.

Screenwriting and directing team Felix Chong and Alan Mak have been around in Hong Kong since 1999, and take a more complex and nuanced approach to storytelling and theme in the way the best Hollywood movies do rather than the B movie disposable feel of many Hong Kong thrillers. They wrote Infernal Affairs, which signalled this new stage of Hong Kong genre thrillers beyond the action-heavy movies of John Woo and Tsui Hark. All the story beats and twists in Martin Scorsese's remake The Departed were actually in the original Hong Kong version, but you wouldn't know that because those were what we already expect from Hollywood thrillers. Chong and Mak effectively proved that there are screenwriters in Hong Kong who are on par with Hollywood's (granted, not as many, but still…). In Chong and Mak's scripts, the real thrill wasn't from big action setpieces but from the tension of the chase, how characters hunt and try to out-think each other, the danger coming from the wrong thing said or the right gesture. It was all about character.

What makes the Overheard movies memorable is how they strongly reflect current realities in Hong Kong: the air of financial corruption, the desperation of people there, and the fat cats who grab everything. The details are specifically Hong Kong, and the series has thrived because it has its finger on the pulse. I may call it a trilogy, but given that the third one has been a hit, it wouldn't surprise me if a fourth or even a fifth movie get made. It's an interesting model for a franchise series: standalone stories with the same themes.

The Overheard movies are available on DVD and Blu-ray from online shops like Amazon and Yesasia.com

Hearing nothing at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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