Review | Detective vs Sleuths movie review: Lau Ching-wan in wildly chaotic police thriller with urgent moral messages at its core

Wai Ka-fai’s film follows a heroic ex-police officer, played by Lau Ching-wan, who has hallucinations that include pleas for help from people before they are killed

The chaotic story makes fun of police and vigilantes, but the endless shoot-outs and explosions make it exhausting to watch

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Lau Ching-wan as ex-police officer Jun Lee in a still from Detective vs Sleuths (category IIB, Cantonese), directed by Wai Ka-fai. Charlene Choi and Raymond Lam co-star.

Published: 11:15am, 20 Jul 2022

3/5 stars

Audiences who worry that the Hong Kong national security law will render every Hong Kong police drama stale and politically correct from now on can take heart in the cinematic release – both in the city and in mainland China – of Detective vs Sleuths, the latest film from director Wai Ka-fai, co-founder of Milkyway Image.

As well as quoting frequently – in German! – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster”), the action thriller portrays supposedly righteous policemen and violent vigilantes alike as evil.

Wai, who is best known for scripting and co-directing several of Johnnie To Kei-fung’s most idiosyncratic films, tends to get completely out of control when he’s directing alone. And so it proves again with Detective vs Sleuths, which recycles the protagonist of 2007 film Mad Detective and the main case in 2013 film Blind Detective, both directed by To and co-scripted by Wai, for an utterly chaotic new story.

Lau Ching-wan plays Jun Lee, a former legend in the police force who has lost his job and family after unexplained hallucinations repeatedly interrupted, and sometimes helped, his investigations.

Such is Wai’s unbridled imagination that the mentally unhinged Lee’s visions even include pleas for help from the ghosts of people … before they are killed.

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