"Drug War" (2013)

Drug Wars is a relentlessly taut crime thriller, always seeming like it's on the verge of spilling over into explosive action or extensive bloodletting. Though it owes much to a number of East Asian genre films including John Woo's oeuvre and Infernal Affairs, it's wholly its own work and often more thematically hefty than its genre counterparts.

When the police attempt to stop a drug ring specializing in methamphetamine, they discover a complex hierarchy of connections and players out for a piece of the pie. In the middle of this is, a drug manufacturer taken in by the police who makes a deal to take down the illegal enterprise in exchange for suspending his death sentence. Much of the film's tense excitement comes from wondering whether Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) will keep his promise to the police. Timmy appears to be playing the criminals to bring them to justice but it consistently becomes hard to tell how much of this he's also doing for his own self-gain, and potentially at the expense of the police. The police captain Zhang Lei (Honglei Sun) gives him the benefit of the doubt while his colleagues are more skeptical, and it's the relationship between the captain and Timmy that stands out most sharply. A begrudging partnership is created between the two men where they tentatively trust one another even as they harbor major, justified reservations.

The film goes out of its way to humanize both the criminals and police. This isn't a film that condemns the criminal lifestyle or choosing to be involved in drug trafficking. The police are often not nearly as competent or smart as they believe themselves to be, and though there's some bungling on the part of the drug pushers, they show skill and intelligence in their own way and, at times, outwit their pursuers. The film is more of an indictment of drug wars of any kind. It's critical of the cost of waging war on drug trafficking; how it only increases violence and instability and makes selling and manufacturing drugs more profitable and thus more likely to continue regardless.

The expense of gazing into the abyss though plays out in the background. The film is firstly an expertly crafted crime drama, unfolding with the assured deliberation of a procedural but acting more like a game of cat and mouse. The film reveals all the gritty details of the process involved in the creation and sale of illegal drugs. The police follow up the food chain, moving away from petty low-lifes making chump change to the heads of the operation. Through it all, the police try to stay one step ahead of their targets with the uncertain help of Choi. The task is at its most intense when police members put on disguises and pretend to be members of the criminal operations, wondering whether they've been left out to hang high and dry. 

Grade: ★★★