Film Review: Peace Breaker (破.局) 2017

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for the entire bloody film!

So the first time I saw this, I was just grateful for a new Aaron Kwok (郭富城) film that wasn’t shite (City Under Siege 全城戒備), or a mainland China Oscar-bait epic that had him as a vague and mysterious (i.e. barely-there) character in someone else’s story (Monk Comes Down the Mountain 道士下山). Was it just relief that made me try to find the blu ray of this and give it another go? Or was it actually a good film once the desperation was stripped away? Let’s find out as we play: review the movie the second time you watch it. As with all posts here, click the picture to embiggen.

First off, I can’t decide if this whole movie is a played-straight-to-maximise-the-laughs dramedy or a thriller that caters to a market that doesn’t do subtle. You know what? It’s both. And for that I’m actually pretty glad.

It’s all set in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s global city and speaker of at least three main languages. That makes things easy for a Chinese cast wanting to make a movie somewhere they can properly get to grips with all kinds of nefarious deeds by Chinese coppers. It’s hard to do this in the mainland where you’re not allowed to portray certain people as evil doers. Anyway, this brings us some wonderful scenery and of course some lovely cultural freshness. Those of you who already know that this film is a Chinese remake of the 2014 Korean box office smash A Hard Day 끝까지 간다 can expect it to be the same almost shot for shot, apart from the location and of course the impressively contortionous face of Aaron Kwok. Now I haven’t seen the Korean original but if it’s better than this? It’s fucking awesome.

So what’s it all about, Alfie? Basically Aaron is a slightly corrupt copper called Gau Jian Shiang having a bad week - his mother has just died. He’s on his way from work to meet up with his wife and young daughter at her funeral when he swerves to miss a dog in the road - and consequently mows down a man instead. Understandably shocked, he of course has to get out and see if the bloke’s alright. He really isn’t - he’s stone dead and the impact has knocked out his glass eye. What do you do? Once he’s got over the initial fright he whips out his phone to call 999 - and then hears a patrol car on the overpass above. Spooked, he snaps into full-on guilty mode and instead hides the body under the bin bags and general garbage by the side of the road. He’s about to drive off when the patrol car sneaks up behind him. Just to add a little more pressure, his missus calls to ask where the hell he is as they’re waiting to start the ceremony. He sits in the car, and I swear every single muscle is wound tighter than a piano wire as he wills the cop car to move on. Luckily, it does - he thinks again about the body under the garbage and instead of leaving it there, wraps it all up and shoves him in the boot of the car.

At this point I did not have Aaron’s character Gau pegged as the smartest of coppers. However I was wrong. What I like is that for every curve ball he’s thrown, he’s desperate to get on with it and come out on top. A run-in with a random DUI stop and check nearly gives him a heart attack but he survives to get to the funeral.

When he does finally get there he’s visibly sad, obviously upset that they have to say goodbye to his mother. But as the ceremony goes on, banging nails into the lid, you realise he’s casing the room, trying work something through his head. Eventually he pays the guard at the morgue to let him sit and watch over his mother until it’s time for the burial. As soon as the door is shut, he locks it and gets to work.

When I first saw this scene I was blown away - the tension was built very well and very carefully in how they brought together the almost manic desperation of Gau working as fast as he could on something he wasn’t sure he should be doing, and the layering of everyone else around him. The guard with the keys, the women under the air vents, the toy and the yanking - it was priceless. And then when he's finally pulled it off and everything seems to be ok, he’s feeling guilty as hell but seems to be hedging that against not having any other choice.

Back at the station, his mates are getting investigated for some dodgy dealings by the drugs unit - and they realise that one, Gau isn’t there, and two, his filing cabinet is the only one padlocked tighter than the nuclear codes in Trump’s office. They smash the locks off and inside find a tablet - which is password protected. So off they go to the funeral to find the hapless Gau and get him to open it and explain the no-doubt dodgy double-entry book keepings on it that will prove to the world that the department is actually on the take. All the other coppers are shitting bricks, thinking the worst. However, this is another time the film underestimates Gau. When they drag him out of the funeral (making his wife extra happy), he seems very uncomfortable as he unlocks the tablet for them - but it’s clean. Everyone else breathes a sigh of relief, and the inspectors say ‘well, fair enough’ and decide perhaps it’s not worth pursuing. Gau goes back to his funeral and everything seems sorted.

At this point I was almost exhausted - the tension and stress poor Gau is going through is communicated to the audience very easily. But of course, things are about to get a lot worse.

Next he rams a police car with his to disguise the damage to the front end - and of course the cop car is fixed quickly and for free. Not as dumb as he looks, is Gau. His best mate tells him that apparently some Inspector Chen dude from the Drugs Enforcement Unit has offered his help with their little investigation, after hearing Gau was attached - but Gau doesn't know this Inspector Chen Chang Min, or why he would mysteriously help him or help cover up the tablet snafu. Strange, indeed.

The next day he learns that they’re after a drugs kingpin who uses a certain mule in all his dealings. The picture is circulated of this drugs mule, Chen Zhang - yes, it’s the man he ran over and killed. The department starts their investigation and they visit the last place anyone saw him - at a scrapyard. Everyone is tooled up and ready to go bust down some doors except for Gau, who tries to tell people that he knows the bloke won’t be here - he has ‘a hunch’. He gets shut down and they prepare to raid the office. There’s a moment where the inspector in charge tells Gau and another copper to take up a vantage point on the opposite side of the scrapyard entrance. The other guy sneaks over and hides so that the waiting bad guys in the office won’t see him, but Gau just lets his gun dangle by his side and ambles over like a teenager told to get in the kitchen and wash dishes. Honestly, it’s hilarious - and then he leans against a scrapped car like he's waiting for a bus, and the inspector just gives him a look, like ‘wtf dude?’, so he straightens up and pretends he’s interested. (This, and other scenes, make me wonder why this movie wasn’t included in the Hong Kong Film Awards for Foreign Movie this year, but hey-ho.)

They raid the place, and of course the drugs mule isn’t there. However, there’s evidence that the bloke left in the middle of his lunch, so bored Gau goes for a wander - and finds that the scrapyard backs onto the road in the exact spot where he ran over and killed the drugs suspect. A squad car pulls up and tells him that an anonymous tipper said there was a body under some bin bags that mysteriously disappeared - and there’s CCTV footage. He looks up and there’s the camera. You can see the moment his heart sinks, but the next thing you know, his best mate is given the task of going through the footage of that night and identifying the car that would have been parked right under it.

He gets to check the footage over a uniformed officer’s shoulder as he brings snacks for them ‘working so hard’ that evening. The number plate is very nearly distinguishable, but they’re going to need to check through all black Hondas with plates beginning with WWM to see whose it is. Always flailing to be half a step ahead, Gau checks the list himself and sees his name is registered to the cop car with that number plate. He’s fucked and he knows it - now he’s standing by his desk trying to think of a way out of it.

And then the phone rings.

It’s the mysterious tipper - he’s back and he says he saw Gau kill a man and then cover it up. He says he wants the man back - now, or he’ll get nasty. Gau realises the guy is calling from across the street to the police station and gives chase - motorbikes, taxis, running (yes, Aaron still runs like his feet slip) - eventually he grabs the guy but gets a full-on punch in the face. His heart nearly stops when he sees they’ve run back to the police station - but then loads of coppers are pulling them apart and trying to find out what’s happened. And here's a good twist - the anonymous tipper is actually a senior inspector - Inspector Chen Chang Min, the one who’s helping them with their war on drugs.

The look on Gau’s face as he puts it all together in his head is again worthy of an Oscar. What he hasn’t banked on is that this inspector is a slippery bastard, adept at turning all situations his way. The stress is ramped up but he appears to collect himself and follow the inspector inside. They then have a fistfight in the men’s room - Gau might win the early round but he doesn’t know he’s being played. When the inspector gets the upper hand quite easily, Gau realises he’s out of his depth and will have to do what he says or his family are literally going to die. Beaten down and beaten, he agrees to give him the dead body back.

He digs up his mother’s coffin, opens it up, and retrieves the dead dude, all the while apologising for desecrating his mother’s grave. Then he remembers that the dead bloke was a drugs mule, and that coupled with the spooky ringing mobile phone in the morgue, he realises what he has to do next. He does a cavity search and finds the phone - battery dead. But plugging it into some power via his car lets him call the last missed number - and the fellow drugs runner on the phone blabs about how he thought the guy was dead, that Inspector Chen is after him. Gau tracks him down and scares the shit out of him by dangling him from a pole over the edge of a tower block until the poor dude tells him everything - that the whole flushing-drugs-before-the-coppers-raid-them so the bent coppers can catch the water and evaporate the drugs out again game is Inspector Chen's idea. Now Gau has the missing part of the puzzle - but what’s he going to do with it? How does he get out of this?

Gau goes back to the scrapyard to find more evidence, and turns up a card missing the centre with a number written on it. It looks like some kind of club. He pockets this just as his best mate and fellow copper turns up. He says he recognised his car on the footage and the report matches Gau's Honda, and just wants to know how bad it all is. Gau decides he’s going to ‘fess up to the police, but his mate says there’s no way his wife and daughter will survive if he does - he thrusts a wad of cash at him and tells him to take his family and run. Gau protests - he can’t dump it all on his best mate to sort out, and he won’t let him go down for it. His mate is adamant - and then the Inspector calls.

Gau gets out of the car as instructed, being told to keep walking toward a certain point. He seems ready to shoot someone, desperately trying to hang onto his sanity. To prove to Gau that he owns him now and he’s not impressed with the other copper being there, the Inspector drops a car on his best mate.

Gau is heartbroken, shocked, and so thoroughly done by this point. What to do about it? It seems everywhere he goes and everything he does, this Inspector is one step ahead of him. The only thing you can do is take a minute to calm down, think things through - and come up with a Hannibal Smith plan. He plans an epic double-cross - meet the Inspector by the lake, load your own gun with blanks, use the drugs mule’s favourite drug-carrying body cavity to hide a hefty amount of plastic explosive, and try very hard not to snap completely due to anxiety, stress, and blood pressure that should be through the roof by now.

They meet. It’s some of the most intense film I’ve seen in ages - it seems to be going Gau’s way but the Inspector, after trying to shoot him (with Gau’s gun, of course, for evidence) now he has the body, is impressed that he thought to load his gun with blanks and actually decides that they should work together full-time. Gau is visibly shaken and now’s his turn to freak out and tell him NO WAY IN HELL I’D RATHER BE DEAD etc. But then he literally stops mid-tantrum and stares at him - and capitulates so fast it’s a wonder his head doesn’t explode. He placates the Inspector, agrees to be his mole in the force for his drugs operations, and gets out of the striking zone. He’s got the detonator in his pocket, after all - all the Inspector has to do is drive away. That’s all. After some wonderfully tense moments, he finally starts the car and goes to get rid of the actual body - the one that was dead before Gau hit him with his car, as it has two dirty great bullet holes in it, and according to the Inspector, the slugs to match the Inspector’s gun.

Gau has to count the seconds until the car is far enough away from him - and then he sets off the explosive.

The car is engulfed in fire, every window is smashed and flames escape - it’s a nice, neat little strike. The car drifts off the road and into the lake, sinking quite fast and leaving nothing but bubbles in the dirt-stirred water.

The relief on Gau’s face - all through his soul - is palpable. He’s done it! He’s free! Yay! He laughs - laughs - because he’s one step closer to getting out of all this and just getting back to his normal life - and his family.

He calls his missus, whom he sent on holiday with their daughter a few nights ago just to be on the safe side, and tells her he’s just packing his bags and he’ll be on the next flight out. Ace.

And then the Inspector turns up at the front door, scorched, bleeding, wet - and so angry yet impressed he doesn’t know what to do first.

Poor Gau’s face is a picture - he’s rooted to the spot in absolute and soul-crushing shock. He can’t even make a sentence as the Inspector uses his bathroom, then looks through the fridge for water. The inevitable ensues - a life and death fight that includes running machines, ties, balconies and heights, bookcases and of course Gau’s gun that was locked in the drawer of the bookcase before the Inspector rammed it down on his head. Eventually the shot is fired - and my heart nearly stopped. It’s a really good camera angle and again come epic acting by both Aaron Kwok and Wang Qian Yuan, the Inspector who started out creepy and ended up malevolently suave. But hey - the Inspector is finally actually dead, and all Gau has to do is work out how to bring all this to the police.

He makes a statement, the top brass wonder what to do and come up burying the whole sad affair - they can’t tell anyone that one of their senior coppers in the Drug Enforcement Unit was actually running a drugs ring no-one could crack, killing drugs mules and coppers with happy abandon. Gau is quietly asked to leave the force, and he does - quite gladly, I’ll wager. He goes home, has an afternoon off in the sun with his wife and daughter. She goes off to collect stones and he runs a business plan past his wife - maybe he’ll have a food truck, selling lunch, and he’ll ask for permission to park it outside the police station. At a few dollars a head and 600 coppers in the building, they should be able to make a living.

That’s when the daughter brings back her shells/stones in her little collection cup and shows it to her mum - who promptly screams. Gau takes the cup to look and oh dear, it’s a glass eye. Only it’s got a giant crack down the middle… He takes it out, breaks it open - and finds a PCB. Wheels start to turn - this is the eye that belonged to the drugs mule, it must have info on it that the Inspector wanted, and asked the drugs mule for. He must have refused to hand it over, so the Inspector killed him. But what could it be? The phone call from his mate said the Inspector was after him for money, but wasn’t any more help than that.

Gau still has the card with the circular hole in the middle - the one with the address of a secret bank and a number written across it. He packs up, goes to the bank, uses the PCB to get in, and they use it to print him a 3D key to a deposit box. Only, when you get to the box, is opens a storage room. Inside it is wall to wall cash - no kidding. He nearly wets himself in excitement - he can share this with the department, right? Or at least get a reward for turning it in.

He calls the Captain who asked him to leave the force. The last we see is his grinning, ecstatic face telling him down the phone I FOUND THE GODDAMN MONEY.

So many things to like about this film - poor Gau getting more and more wound up and trying desperately to squirm out of every trap and plan laid for him; the Inspector being completely slimy and truly unlikeable and yet very clever; the tension and pacing to every scene; the way it’s shot, that gives added weight to darkness and how it’s contrasted with the happy beach scenes - the first time I watched this, I thought it was great. Now I watch it a second time, I think it’s awesome. A truly well-done, well-thought out string of events that leads to a satisfying conclusion.

I like that you could put things together for yourself, and didn’t have to have things explained to you, like they so often do in American movies. I like that you care about the characters right off the bat, that they give little quirks to them all so you have a sense of personality from them. I like the way they portray the action scenes and the consequences. In fact my only gripe is that you don't see if Gau then made any provision for his friend’s funeral after he found the cash, but judging by the way he kept his mate's name plate from his police desk it would be hard to believe that he didn’t. The choice of song for the drugs mule's ringtone was inspired. Even the during-the-end-credits scene - about how Gau got into the safety deposit room - was gold. Ad-libs by an extra or a voice-over? You be the judge.

Final verdict? 9.5/10 - epic shots, great story, fast-moving plot, good character development and a great cast, all good at their jobs. What’s not to be impressed by? This is getting a 9.5 - and I don’t go higher than that.

That’s pretty much it for now, but we have loads of stuff booked at the pictures so there’ll be more US movie reviews soon.

Peach and lube, everybody - peach and bloody lube.

Soopytwist.