Hong Kong Action. When you hear that term, a few things come to mind. First is one of the biggest movie stars of the past 30 years, Jackie Chan. Second is balletic shootouts, thanks to John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam and their stunningly choreographed movies that birthed the term -heroic bloodshed. With those two extremes forming the spine of this hot territory’s film output, it makes Johnnie To something of an outsider. While To’s work shared a similar approach to action cinema, his dramatic scenes were more improvisational and lived-in than the melodrama exhibited elsewhere. Credit where it is due, then, he has long outlived the popularity of this style of Hong Kong cinema. 2003’s PTU saw him play around with the toolkit of hong kong action, but never in the ways you’d expect.
Regular collaborator Lam Suet is Anti-Triad Unit Sgt. Lo Sa. He loses his pistol after being drawn away from a restaurant so an unknown party can murder an influential triad bigwig character who goes by ‘Ponytail’. After being beaten in a nearby alley and his car painted yellow by a local kid, Suet promises to get his service revolver back before the next day, asking for leeway from his inter-departmental peers. Other prominent players on the police side include PTU (police tactical unit) Sgt. Mike (Simon Yam) and PTU Sgt. Kat (Maggie Shiu). The triads have colourful names, like ‘Bald Head’ and ‘Eye Ball’ – as they usually do in films like this. Throughout this one night, we follow the police attempt to recover a service pistol and get to the bottom of the case, finding who murdered ‘Ponytail’.
In my ever-frayed opinion, too many movies are frustrating and limited in their scale of world-building. For too many scriptwriters, a world is conceived and created, then it seizes to be once the credits roll – everything neatly self-contained, concluded and wrapped up in a bow. PTU is the antithesis of such clumsy purpose-driven writing, thanks to a deliberately hectic script. Many things are left open-ended as we spend a night in this ensemble’s company. The story begins before the title card and will finish long after the credits roll – this is a living community with histories known only by those who took part in the story workshops. Outside of the way he shoots a scene or the freedom he allows his actors, this is his greatest strength as a storyteller. Unfortunately, he can go too far the other way. Election (2005), for example, becomes an arduous task, keeping up with the comings and goings of a cast at least a dozen-plus people deep. PTU, fortunately, finds a neater balancing point.
The space that this all creates is something only Johnnie To could manage – no other Hong Kong action director would know what to do with all this silence. Well, maybe blow something up. There was always that option.
Often, the typical police movie depicts “the law” as heroic, whether through brutish methods or something more clean-cut and white-washed. PTU deviates from that path again, with this being an openly satirical take on the Hong Kong Police state. Writers Yau Nai-hoi & Au Kin-Yee point the finger at police incompetence and police brutality in equal measure, two topics of increasing, evergreen global relevance. The missing gun is a farce. After all the death and chaos caused throughout this one night, all the offending party can do is laugh. There is no other reasonable response, which is tragic, honestly. Police brutality is more of a bedrock to PTU. Two scenes come to mind when discussing how it depicts police brutality. The first has Simon Yam take a young triad to one side after he spoke out of turn, only for him to slap the gangster for minutes. He then demands he rubs a tattoo off his neck, ending with a shot of a bloody wound on the footsoldier’s neck with the tattoo still perfectly intact. The other sees one of Simon Yam’s men kick someone to death, someone who had to audacity to run when being chased by a heavily armed policeman. There is a brutal, frank reality on these night streets.
Blocking – or how a director moves his cast and camera around a scene – is another high point of To’s work. How he fills his screen with characters and actors yet never allows a scene to feel busy, for me, this deserves to be studied in film schools up and down the land. For me, PTU is just as impressive for its looks. The movie takes place at night and has a visual identity similar to a Michael Mann film – think Collateral without the LA lighting. Instead, natural lighting is king (or at least that is the impression). What this manifests is a feeling unlike any other Hong Kong action movie. See, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated territories on the planet, and to see the empty night streets is an unforgettable, haunting image. The space that this all creates is something only Johnnie To could manage – no other Hong Kong action director would know what to do with all this silence. Well, maybe blow something up. There was always that option.
Unfortunately, that is the only bad point of this 2003 movie – when it isn’t silent, or someone isn’t filling the space by talking, it fills in the gaps with some of the worst music these ears have taken in this side of lift muzak.
To use current internet vernacular, Johnnie To is a vibe. If you watch PTU hoping to see something from the same red-hot scene that gave the world stone-cold classics like Hard Boiled or City on Fire, there is nothing for you here. However, if you are well-versed in everything that era had to offer and are on the hunt for those left-of-centre oddities that play with the way such stories unfold – Johnnie To and PTU might have something for you.
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