The Goldfinger (金手指), dir. Felix Chong

Nostalgia. That's this film's main selling point. The unprecedented second pairing of Tony Leung and Andy Lau, whose iconic undercover-agent vs. corrupt-cop double-hander in the Infernal Affairs trilogy remains a rock-solid landmark in post-handover Hong Kong cinema. (If you have only seen Scorsese's damnable remake of the first Infernal Affairs, well, subscribe to this newsletter to atone for that.)

Tony Leung's charm carries the entire film. Having finally left behind restrained portrayals of emotionally wounded and devastatingly handsome men that made him an arthouse darling, he can now ham it up as a self-made billionaire whose riches are obtained via brazen financial fraud in 1970s and 80s Hong Kong. (You can tell he is enjoying himself playing this character.) Indeed, I am reminded of Michelle Yeoh's own delicious turn as the chaotic Captain Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery.

The film matches the excesses of Leung's protagonist with a flourish of gloriously madcap and totally over-the-top montages. Sadly, the rest of it is both overcooked and undercooked.

Overcooked, because there many infodumps to give the audience background rather than weaving it into the narrative. The first act takes too long to set up a rags-to-riches tale, and the final act sags into plodding legal pseudo-drama without any satisfying emotional climax or resolution. Undercooked, because several characters don't get enough development. In particular, Charlene Choi's character is supposed to be femme fatale and shrewd businesswoman, but she doesn't get enough screen time.

Andy Lau, regrettably, is saddled with a clichéd soap-operatic subplot that portrays him as a workaholic anti-corruption investigator who neglects his family (a teenaged daughter and a wife who has just given birth).

Writer-director Felix Chong seems unable to replicate the sleek propulsive storytelling he deployed in co-writing the Infernal Affairs trilogy. In fact, here he recycles tropes from 1980s and 90s Hong Kong cinema: British expats in Hong Kong as buffoons (an anti-colonial touch that seems to have disappeared from Hong Kong film), women as sex objects (but still PG enough to be family-friendly).

Tony Leung's performance, full of cheekiness and charisma, is almost worth the price of your cinema ticket. If you're looking for a film that let the political and sexual anxieties of Hong Kong men play out through cool violence, steaming food, and smouldering cigarettes, give in to nostalgia, and rewatch the Infernal Affairs trilogy instead.