At heart, I think all of us want to be a criminal. If I'm just wrong and that's just me, then I amend my statement to say we all want to be cops--I don't even know what crimes are, let alone how one "commits" them--but there's got to be something to explain the enduring appeal of crime stories.
Like that they're awesome. I spend the first three hours of every day dreaming about robbing imagination-banks. Judging by the prevalence of incredible thrillers like 2002's Infernal Affairs, I'm not the only one with law-scoffing on the mind.
Andy Lau and Tony Leung are men with double lives: Lau is a police inspector, but secretly works for Triad crime boss Eric Tsang; as a deep undercover cop, Leung has to live the part of one of Tsang's thugs. After the details of a drug deal are tipped to both cops and crooks, Lau and Leung are each tasked with ferreting out the other side's mole.
That concept is so good if it were a car it would run on condensed love and could also fly. It's so good the American remake of it, The Departed, won about 287 Oscars. I would propose to that idea if I thought I was good enough for it. Execute it with any competence at all and you're looking at a kingly picture.
Codirectors Wai-keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak do better than that. Like The Departed, Infernal Affairs starts with an extended semi-montage that immediately commands the attention.
Confident and propulsive, that masterful beginning leads into a lean plot that never slows down to explain any more than it needs to. It should be confusing, but its directors seem to have an intuitive grasp on the details they need to include to prevent viewers' brains from blasting question marks out their ears. Leung's internalized performance takes the same angle, suggesting the emotional turmoil the film doesn't really have time to dig into.
I was less struck by Infernal Affairs' score. It's mostly cool, but at a couple romantic moments it drops into a melodramatic swoon that's miles away from the caged energy of the rest of the movie. It's like getting a tiger with an eyepatch and one stub ear but then one day a month you dress it up in a bonnet and a diaper. Little discordant, that's all.
That's about the only wrong note here (self-high five on that pun). Otherwise, Infernal Affairs is a tight, elegant thriller. As Leung and Lau try desperately to hold on to who they were, it becomes a quiet tragedy, too.