Deconstructing the whole film with the title of the film, but only in the opening scene of the accident of human trafficking, it really portrayed the terrible drug. What does drugs look like, and why do drugs ruin one life after another? Behind every question, there must be shocking pain. But under the six-character slogan "The human heart is more poisonous than poison", the dark human nature that the film wants to understand is obvious, and the consequences are blunt, so there is no need to repeat the cause. Johnnie To appeared with the classic neat rhythm of the Milky Way image, and a cat-and-mouse game of police and gangsters followed one after another.
Although the film advertises the confrontation between Sun Honglei and Louis Koo, I feel that there is no protagonist in "Drug War". To be precise, every character in "Drug War" is a pawn to be manipulated. Whether it is Sun Honglei's anti-narcotics captain Zhang Lei, Gu Tianle's drug lord Cai Tianming, and other police officers who died in chasing after the car overnight to investigate the case, Cai Tianming's puppet is online and the Gang of Seven in Hong Kong... They are all just huge drugs. A clue in the network is intertwined, and affects the whole body. But besides them, between justice and crime, there will still be an endless stream of victims.
Under the system where violence is power, the only purpose of the police is to capture drug dealers. For drug dealers, the desire to live is more than anything else. This setting is simple and rude from one end to the other, but it beats the ugliness of human nature like gunshots. Doing subtraction at the necessary moment, although it can't be called a slant forward, is better than doing it twice with half the effort. The tone of the whole film is permeated with this unquestionable cold temperament, even if some lines are intriguing, it still runs through thought-provoking black humor.
The sophistication of "Drug War" lies in its separation of pretentious theatrical conflicts. In thousands of genres, the audience is tired of being forced to accept vulgar and inferior sensational messages. Everyone has a past, as well as compelling sorrow. The inability to do anything about the past will eventually become a chaotic interference to the future. Therefore, the characters in "Drug War" all have a strong and hard aura, and they are simply not balanced between good and evil. This kind of intuitive emotions makes it harder for people to stay out of things. Interests and desires are the most primitive human topics. The choices are often irrelevant to the big age, but they are enough to shake the fate of little people.
To Qifeng To, "Drug War" is obviously a milestone attempt. Putting a police film on the mainland for the first time also means that he is about to face the impact of the system for the first time. Fortunately, the uncompromising and aggressive temperament from the golden age of Hong Kong films is still aggressive. To Qifeng To put his pride in the most overlooked but most embarrassing details: the eye-catching "no torture to extract a confession" in the police interrogation room; the five-star red flag flying in the ships controlled by the underworld; the drug dealer did not hesitate to burn it as valuable The lost renminbi; all mainland place names that have been vaguely reset... this attitude is not humble, and there is no desire to cover up the inferiority.
Together with the prosperous cities that frequently appeared in other commercial films, they also disappeared here. From a certain perspective, singing the praises of riotousness is all done by inferiority people. Looking directly at reality is the experience that should best be delivered to the audience at the moment. Just like the entire drug network hidden in the dark, in Du Qifeng's images, he has tried his best to idealize the vision for the audience. Smoky factories, rough streets, and congested highways. The choice of these scenes has nothing to do with aesthetics, but it reflects the real texture incisively and vividly. In addition, plots such as police drug use, death penalty live broadcasts, and headshot shots are not so much a challenge to the scale, but as a challenge to yourself. When others only dared to try, Du Qifeng had already done it with his head up.
I believe that "Drug War" does not need to use some "most" words to collage its own style, because in a certain field, it is the only one.
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