The synopsis on this said it was a look at the difference between reality and what the media portrays. That’s not a fair framing of this movie, which is about the cops controlling the narrative. The media, which the framing portrays as feckless or collaborative, is fucking honest and great in this movie.
The story is bonkers. A shootout starts on a side street in Hong Kong. That shootout essentially extends into an apartment building in a different part of the city, resulting in a standoff. There are automatic weapons, a fucking bomb gets tossed, cars all over the place have bullet holes and broken windows, and like, one guy was hit in the leg.
The plot consists of the police operation to flush out the criminals, but it is mostly in service to the media narrative that takes up a large portion of both the movie and what the cops care about. It’s all about the show, according to Superintendent Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen). Craft the narrative to make the cops look competent and capable. There is even a scene or two where they explicitly discuss editing video to give to the press because they know they’ll show it. It reminded me of NY Focus’s piece describing the NYPD media department and how they can use their own people to shape the story we all see on local news.
There’s also the angle of this being in the very new internet era. Video was just beginning to show up online in 2004 (YouTube was started in 2005, for instance), and this movie shows us how the information age was immediately becoming democratized. In this case, while the cops had the ear of the newscasts, the criminals were able to upload video and get it to the stations themselves, undercutting the bullshit the cops were feeding the public. That was the point of all this back then. Instead, it bastardized itself into misinformation and vacciner denialism. Fuck.
Overall, this was rad. I picked it specifically to see the media part, and was very pleasantly surprised to learn that this was a real media. I got to watch what would happen in a better world than we live in with regard to information. Heck, this movie made me nostalgic for the promise of the democratized information structure. I loved it, and I suspect I’ll be watching it a few more times.