Integrity film review: anti-corruption drama by Infernal Affairs director is engaging but lacks knoc

Review | Integrity film review: anti-corruption drama by Infernal Affairs director is engaging but lacks knockout punch

3/5 stars

Alan Mak Siu-fai is back in the good books of his hometown crowd. While his last film, the China-targeted action thriller Extraordinary Mission (2017), performed modestly at the China box office and bombed in Hong Kong, the co-director of the Infernal Affairs and Overheard trilogies has come up with one of the top-grossing local films released over the Chinese New Year holiday in Hong Kong.

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And what confident sleight of hand he has shown with this convoluted anti-corruption drama, which he wrote and directed; regular collaborator Felix Chong Man-keung ( Project Gutenberg ) was co-producer. Integrity has the conviction to engage its viewers solely with intricate plotting, rather than the usual action overload – the first car chase only takes place 80 minutes into the film, and is over before you know it.

Lau Ching-wan plays King, the chief investigator of Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), who is banking on a key witness, the corporate accountant Jack (Nick Cheung Ka-fai), to testify in court against a high-level customs officer (Anita Yuen Wing-yi) and a tobacco trading company CEO accused of bribery and smuggling. When neither Jack nor the CEO show up on the day of the hearing, King is given seven days to save the prosecution’s case.

It transpires that Jack has flown home to Sydney. Expert ICAC negotiator Shirley (Karena Lam Ka-yan) – who is King’s estranged wife – is sent to persuade the whistle-blower to have a change of heart. Meanwhile King, who seems to have known Jack for much longer than it would initially appear, resorts to often illegal means to track down the mastermind pulling the strings of the two defendants.

Unlike most recent Hong Kong crime dramas, Integrity derives its tension by depicting the secrets and lies of its characters rather than bombarding audiences with shoot-outs and car chases. It’s not every day that a thriller takes the time to show how an investigator seizes the dashcam footage from a Uber driver, much less comment on the bizarre legal status of the car-hailing service in the city via an extended gag.

For all its patient scripting, atmospheric build-up and efforts to appear contemporary (cryptocurrency plays a key part in the plot), however, Mak fails to deliver a credible knockout punch when he finally tries to wrap up the story’s many loose ends. Repeated suggestions that “blood will be shed” do not a thriller make, and an out-of-nowhere CGI flashback sequence to the protagonists’ adolescence is straight out of uncanny valley.

With Project Gutenberg and now Integrity, Chong and Mak have respectively crafted suspenseful crime dramas that take a twisty narrative to its illogical extreme – and, some would say, see their efforts fall apart in the last act. Still, there are far worse movies being churned out by Hong Kong filmmakers and the pair deserve credit for their bravery in experimenting with complex narratives, even if they fall a long way short of their previous highs.

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