Movie Review: Blind Detective/盲探

Snoochie Boochies.

I was nervous going into Blind Detective/盲探. Johnnie To’s last two films had not only disappointed me; they had enraged me. Romancing in Thin Air/高海拔之戀Ⅱ was so awful I couldn’t even choke out a review.

It’s so bad it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Drug War/毒戰 drove me batty.

So I was ready to walk out of the cinema if need be.

Luckily I didn’t need to.

Blind Detective/盲探 feels much more like a local film to me, and thank God for that.

I love pornography as much as the next (three) guy(s), but I couldn’t bear another 90 minutes of Johnnie To performing Chinalingus (舔中國)[sic].

It was nice to see Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng together in a movie again.

“I watchedSwitch , Andy…”

Andy Lau plays Johnston, a blind citizen who solves cold cases for the reward money.

Welcome to Madame Tussauds.

Sammi Cheng plays a bumbling police inspector who has a cold case from her past she would like solved.

If Sammi Cheng can’t convince local women of the absolute beauty of freckles, then they deserve whatever bad effects all that whitening garbage brings on them.

While the trailer might lead you to believe this is a generic crime drama, the film is quite different.

This different.

It’s a murder mystery (eventually), but it’s also a throwback to  the hyper-paced, over-the-top movies of Hong Kong cinema of 20 or even 30 years ago.

It’s a weird experience to want to compare a Johnnie To movie to a Frankie Chan movie, but that’s what it feels like.

Refreshing, but a little sting-y too.

You’ve never seen anyone overact as well as Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. They are loud, excessive, and abrasive, but it’s ceaselessly entertaining and even engaging.

Blind Detective/盲探 is the nicest looking romantic farce you’ll ever see. The sumptuous cinematography certainly helps separate Blind Detective/盲探 from its predecessors, at least on a visual level.

“Andy, blind people are blind even with their eyes open…”

The acting manages the same remarkable feat; imagine if Eric Kot Man Fai, who can be both a very convincing dramatic actor as well as a scene-chewer who makes chainsaws jealous, could combine the two disparate halves.

Like this.

You’ve never seen anyone overact as well as Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng. They are loud, excessive, and abrasive, but it’s ceaselessly entertaining and even engaging.

Johnnie To managed to get Andy Lau to  overact, and these days that’s no small achievement.

It was both refreshing and endearing to watch Andy Lau really act for a change. He seems to sleepwalk through his roles sometimes, content to flash the watch, the tea, and the smile (though not too much on that third one as it might show his creases).

“Whatever, b*tches…”

I was very happy to see Andy Lau dig into this role both mentally and physically. I appreciated the obvious effort on display here, and it is a big part of my enjoyment of the film.

I don’t recall seeing Andy vomit onscreen since 2001’sFulltime Killer , but I’m probably wrong.

I know this isn’t Andy Lau, b*tches.

Sammi Cheng is no stranger to the overly broad portrayal of whiny, needy women, but here she manages, perhaps by keeping her voice in the lower registers, to avoid crossing the line between attention-seeking and aggravation.

Other than this.

Her character (and the narrative) required a broader range of emotion from her than Andy’s, and she was convincing throughout.

The characters’ mannerisms and dialog, while most often overplayed, were nevertheless somehow very realistic; they seemed like real people, and were therefore not only easier and more fun to watch, but drew me into the film.

Philip Keung Ho Man was really impressive in a small role that was worth the price of admission all by itself.

“I know he made Switch , but don’t do it!”

Guo Tao was difficult for me to connect to because he was dubbed into Cantonese. It made more narrative sense for him to be (just as it made sense for Gao Yuanyuan not to be), but it took me out of the movie during his scenes.

Which was not always a bad thing.

Lam Suet was his usual dependable, entertaining self.

The illegal logging subplot kinda lost me, to be honest.

It helped that he appeared in one of the funniest segments of the film, in a Macau casino, but he would have made any part of the movie better (not that it wasn’t already very, very good).

But it was impossible not to have an inherently ambivalent relationship with the narrative and/or the film itself.

And not just for being expected to buy into ‘driving by Braille.’

I admire Johnnie To for setting himself a rather challenging task: a romantic farce about murder.

Blind Detective/盲探’s bipolar swings between all-out, take-no-prisoners comedy and crushing melodrama left me, by film’s end, somewhere in the middle.

“What if I grope her?”

Eventually, I didn’t enjoy the comedy as much because I knew it would get serious again sometime soon.

And when that happened, I had stopped worrying too much, because I knew it would get funny again soon.

So for people that can stay on that roller coaster, I am sincerely jealous.

I enjoyed this film thoroughly, though I left it rather baffled by the third act, if only because I was unsure of how to respond to it, and as a consequence I didn’t.

“Alas, poor Yuen…”

But my lasting impression is one of laughter and smiling, and it had been a long time since I did that in a Johnnie To movie, so I am grateful.

Ummmmm…

I laughed out loud, and I realized my face felt funny because I was chronically smiling.

Don’t let my inability to understand the emotional shifts prevent you from watching a really fun, entertaining, well-made film.

Go see it and decide for yourself.