正义回廊

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原名：正義迴廊又名：The Cloister of Justice / The Sparring Partner

分类：剧情 / 犯罪 / 地区：中国香港年份：2022

简介：张显宗（杨伟伦饰）联同友人唐文奇 (麦沛东饰) 于寓所内杀害父母，并进行肢解

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更新时间:2023-08-04

正义回廊影评：[Film Review] The Sparring Partner (2022) and A Guilty Conscience (2023)

Hong Kong cinema has undergone quite a resurgence recently, box-office-wise. While the numbers of local productions are dwindling year by year, audience’s support of indigenous pictures is soaring, Ho Cheuk-Tin’s feature debut THE SPARRING PARTNER is rated Category III (only allowing aged 18 or above to watch), and earns a receipts of $5.53 million and sits comfily as the tenth highest-grossing movie of 2022 in Hong Kong. Months later, named screenwriter Jack Ng’s A GUILTY CONSCIENCE, also his first foray in the director’s chair, has accrued a whopping $14.91 million since its release during the Spring Festival period in 2023, grandly shattering the record as the highest-grossing Chinese film in Hong Kong to date, dethroning Ng Yuen-Fai’s WARRIORS OF FUTURE (2022), a Sci-Fi juggernaut and massive hit.

Incidentally, both THE SPARRING PARTNER and A GUILTY CONSCIENCE are courtroom dramas, it appears that they even share the same courtroom set for the shooting, but stylistically, tonally, and sentimentally, they are diametrically different.

THE SPARRING PARTNER gets its inspiration from the 2013 Tai Kok Tsui double parricide and dismemberment case and doesn’t shy from revealing the grisly facts (the main reason it receives a Category III rating). Henry Cheung (Alan Yeung) is accused of murdering his parents with the help of Angus Tong (Mak), and the ensuing courtroom procedural tries to unpick the perpetrator’s sick frame of mind while a nine-person jury deliberates on their verdict, and the main rub is, is the seemingly retarded Angus (with an IQ of 84) merely an accessory or in fact a felon like Henry?

Henry, played by Yeung with a sneering air of dissociation and unregeneracy, is a hard nut to crack for empathy, not to mention sympathy. Ho’s film strains to extract any scintilla of worthiness out of him, yet its effort largely goes down the drain, his murderous motive is never satisfactorily spelt out, is it simply because of the parents’s favoritism and his inceldom? What the film hurts for is a capable profiler who can decipher his psychological acedia, and the analogy between Henry and Hitler is a cheap cop-out.

Jurors are more conflicted towards Angus, and Mak makes a feast of acting dumb in his wuss camouflage, it nearly becomes an overkill (his dumbness is so monotonous and unrelieved), aided by Harriet Yeung, who plays Angus’s elder sister and pleads for his innocence with a torrent of passion welling up when she is on the witness stand. However, THE SPARRING PARTNER lets slip the filmmaker’s dubiety of Mak’s involvement in the end, after all, it doesn’t take much to act stupid, acting smart is the real challenge. By comparison, three actors who play the barristers (So, Lamb and Chow) manage to ring the changes with their sharp-tongued ambivalence and the 12 ANGRY MEN emulation of jury debate vividly churns out the usual conscience-related bromide and“in dubio pro reo” tenet. Although it suffers in some incoherence and lucidity along the way (the suffixed coda is quite baffling), at least, THE SPARRING PARTNER nails its noblesse oblige in the mast and soldiers on strenuously like a pyrrhic victor, occasionally, Ho also sinks his teeth into experimenting various filmmaking techniques (playing with light and shadows, monochromatic flashback sequences, lurid fantasy scenarios, etc.) like every tender-foot does. .

A GUILTY CONSCIENCE also revolves around a dastardly crime, the death of a pre-teen girl, but it is anything but gruesome. The girl’s mother Jolene (Louise Wong) is wronged sentenced for manslaughter thanks to her lawyer Adrian Lam (Dayo Wong)’s slaphappy attitude and action. Filled with guilt, when a chance to rectify his mistake emerges, Adrian takes it on himself to ensure that the real offenders get nailed this time.

As a vehicle for Dayo Wong, a perennially popular Hong Kong stand-up comedian whose film credits are sparse, A GUILTY CONSCIENCE consciously aligns itself to Wong’s comedic tonality and eloquence. The whole shebang is about a man with a good conscience fighting against the insurmountable plutocratic pressure and righting his own wrongs, a time-honored road-to-redemption trajectory that no real surprise is primed, even the case itself is self-evident in mid stream via a flashback. What hooks audience is the anticipation to see how those moneyed, callous bastards to be vanquished despite of their insuperable privileges, and Ng’s film doesn’t disappoint in this regard, in particular when the senior prosecutor (Tse Kwan-Ho, inimitably august and inscrutably righteous) shifts his ground and lays into the culprit, although juridically speaking, some of the elocution smacks of fanfaronade, tailored to create some semblance of a rousing contentment which has been deployed ad nauseam in similar situations, at the end of the day, justice must prevails, and audience feel good about it. In a sense, A GUILTY CONSCIENCE’s crowd-pleasing felicity actually mirrors THE SPARRING PARTNER’s flinty gaze upon the society’s underside, both are justifiable for their own conception, but the latter requests some mettle to forge through.

A side note, in A GUILTY CONSCIENCE, Adrian’s partner, the young barrister Evelyn (an enterprising Renci Yeung), who first appears to possess the equal weight in the film, slowly loses her purchase as the film demotes her on the sideline, so as not to steal Dayo Wong’s limelight. It is faintly offensive and paternalistic to allow Adrian to sham exasperation toward an oblivious Evelyn just to put her out of harm’s way, while the whole time, Evelyn shows no sign that she is a lesser capable lawyer than him. No way the screenwriters could divvy up some of Adrian’s meaty, stirring delivery to Evelyn, who just sits there quietly watching. The hierarchy of star power kills an empowering moment of catharsis.

referential entries: Philip Yung’s PORT OF CALL (2015, 7.2/10); Michael Mann’s MANHUNT (1986, 7.4/10).