Search - Infernal Affairs 3 (Special Collector's Edition) on DVD

"Everything will be OK tomorrow."

Trevor Willsmer | London, England | 01/18/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Infernal Affairs III doesn't live up to its predecessors, but not for want of trying. Its biggest problem isn't the intriguing prequel/sequel structure that juxtaposes the aftermath of the first film as Andy Lau tries to be the good man he wants to be, with disastrous consequences, alongside the last months of Tony Leung's undercover man life. Rather, it's the fact that it takes so long to really find its stride. It's not until the two-thirds mark that it really kicks in with a hospital scene where past, present and possible future collide that completely wrongfoots you. You're suddenly in a whole new place that makes you rethink what you thought was going on, leading to a powerful ending that isn't as affecting as II, but leaves one character quite literally in the circle of unending, inescapable hell. It's also here that the theme of loss of identity starts to work overtime, as Lau forgets who he is, participating in the dead Leung's sessions with the court-appointed psychiatrist and setting out to expose a corrupt cop oblivious to the fact that the evidence incriminates himself.

While Lau spends most of the movie thinking he's digging a tunnel when he's actually digging his own grave, the flashback scenes involving Leung are very different to his character's trajectory in the previous movies. If Lau is a bullet train to hell, for the first time we see Leung's character in his happier moments as he is filled with hope for a future the captions gradually counting down to his death constantly deny him. In that sense it's less subversive than the first two films, which broke time-honored HK thriller tradition by letting the bad guys win, but it works on its own terms, and while it does take too long to sort itself out (or rather for the characters to lose sight of themselves), there's a constant governing intelligence to it that separates it from other HK pictures of its ilk. Indeed, it's only really in comparison to the other two films that the third seems the lesser. It probably would have helped if they'd spent a little more time on it - it was released only two months after the second film. However, you really need to see the films in the order they were made to get the most out of them: nearly all of the film's emotional touchstones (such as the oft-repeated "Everything will be ok tomorrow" or the song that first linked the characters) relate to the previous films."