Infernal Affairs Blu-ray offers decent video and superb audio in this overall recommended Blu-ray release
Two men. Two moles. Yan is your typical undercover cop, tough, smart, and extremely hard-
boiled. Before graduating the police academy, Yan is sent by his official to infiltrate the triads.
Ming is one of Hong Kong's most decorated cops. However, his awards and promotions are only
illusions. Sam, his triad boss, sent him to join the academy to become an officer. With tips
from Sam against their triad rivals, Ming steadily becomes one of Hong Kong's elite. But all
things, no matter good or evil, must come to an end. So begins the face-off. Only one man,
one mole will survive.
Oh, for those thrilling days of yesteryear when good was good, evil was evil, and the heroes and villains made it all
easy by wearing white and black hats. Moral certainty has obviously gone the way of the dinosaur, at least for films like
Infernal Affairs, which has so many characters at cross purposes and with conflicting motives that had they all
been wearing hats, they no doubt would have been uniformly gray. Infernal Affairs was a sensation in 2002
when it was released in Hong Kong and it went on to provide the inspiration for the film that finally won Martin Scorsese
a Best Director Academy Award, The Departed. If you've seen The Departed, Infernal Affairs
makes a fascinating Ur-experience, as if some archival version of the Scorsese film had been unearthed and suddenly
provided an alternate universe version of the basic storyline. If you haven't seen The Departed, at least some
aspects of Infernal Affairs might initially be confusing, as this film whizzes by at the cinematic equivalent of the
speed of sound, and the conflicting motives and interrelationships of several of the characters can take a second
viewing to completely unravel. Director Andrew Lau wastes absolutely no time in this film, providing a brisk prologue
(which might not be completely clear to first time viewers) that sets up the two main characters, Chan (ultimately played
by Tony Leung) and Lau (ultimately played by Andy Lau, not the same as the director), shown here in their relative
youths and set up as rival "moles," each unaware of the other. Chan is shown to have been deceptively "expelled"
from the police force, when in actuality he's been recruited to go undercover and infiltrate the triad crime organization
run by local mob boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang). At the same time, Hon himself has recruited a whole slew of young men
he's set up to infiltrate the police, chief among them Lau. The bulk of the film takes place a few years later, after Chan
is well ensconced in the criminal underworld and Lau has climbed the ranks of the police force and is a trusted Senior
Inspector.
Much of Infernal Affairs plays out as a sort of mirror image cat and mouse game. Lau's superior Wong (Anthony
Wong) wants to discover who the mole is on his force, ultimately helping Lau get promoted to investigate the situation
(obviously investigating himself, as it were). Wong is also one of the few people to know Chan's real identity, but
wants
Chan to stay undercover until Hon can be arrested. Meanwhile, Hon is out to figure out who the mole is in his
organization, and guess who ends up investigating that? Chan, of course. In the meantime, Chan in his guise as
undercover cop is attempting to ferret out who the police mole is, and he comes dangerously close to uncovering Lau's
secret. Making all of this all the more convoluted is the fact that the two men actually know each other socially from an
early scene in a stereo shop, where Lau buys a system from Chan.
What the real subtext of Infernal Affairs is, though, is "who are these guys, anyway?" These
are two men desperately pretending to be something they aren't, and running not just from the truth but from their
own inner conflict about what their choices in life have brought them to. If Lau is putatively the more comfortable, he's
perhaps also the more duplicitous, sneaking in information to the crime boss right under the noses of his police
superiors. Chan on the other hand is on the verge of a breakdown, wanting more than anything to ditch the criminal
lifestyle and reclaim his life as a policeman. He's conflicted enough that he's seeing a therapist, something that plays
out in unexpected ways as these two lives collide late in the film.
Some of Infernal Affairs can be a tad confusing, especially because director Lau takes things at such a
breakneck pace and the viewer is more or less plopped down into this labyrinth without a lot of preparation. If you can
get past the opening gambit, where characters are introduced rapid fire and the basic set up is initiated, the bulk of the
film falls nicely into place and things become much clearer after the first half hour or so. At that point both moles are
firmly ensconced in their respective territories and the real cat and mouse games can begin.
The creative team both in front of the camera and behind it in Infernal Affairs is on record as stating that while
they appreciate The Departed, they feel it was a Hollywood-ized version of their film, and the fact is that really
can't be disputed, especially when one considers the megawatt star power the Scorsese project offered. What
Infernal Affairs offers that perhaps The Departed didn't is a grittier, more unseemly ambience that may
exaggerate the moral ambivalence of these characters but which makes their inner turmoil all the more visceral.
Infernal Affairs cops out a little (no pun intended) in its final moments, not offering the standard denouement
those with a firm moral compass might have wanted, but that, too, may be part of director Lau's insistence that the
days of white hats and black hats are long, long gone.
Infernal Affairs is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.34:1. This is a weirdly shoddy
looking Blu-ray that is plagued with noise, digital sharpening and a just kind of ugly look that may argue that the source
elements were not all they might have been, despite the film's relatively recent vintage. Some of the film looks quite good,
oddly the opening credits sequence being one of the standout segments. Some of the close-ups in outside locations also
pop with abundant clarity and fine detail. But large swaths of the film are just bathed in noise that begins to approach the
look of swarms of locusts, things are quite soft generally while having the odd addition of edge enhancement offering
considerable haloing at times, and despite overall strong color and decent contrast, this is somewhat of a disappointing Blu-
ray debut for a film that has such an impressive pedigree and influence.
Infernal Affairs has two lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio options, one in the original Cantonese and the
other a fairly useless English dub. To dispense with the English dub first off, it's mixed obscenely loudly (just toggle back
and forth between the English and Cantonese mixes for a quick example of this), and the dub frequently has little to do
with the original Cantonese dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles. The Cantonese mix on the other hand is incredibly
robust (without being overly loud), with some fantastic directionality with a wealth of ambient environmental effects and
several great action sequences. Dialogue is clear and well prioritized, and the film has some aggressive use of LFE in
several sequences. Dynamic range is surprisingly wide in this film, which has several quieter dialogue moments
interspersed with the more action-heavy sequences.
If you're a fan of The Departed, you'll probably really enjoy seeing the film that inspired Scorsese's remake. This
original version may not be as nuanced as Scorsese's film, but in a way it's more visceral, due partly to its breakneck pace,
but also due to the fact that it doesn't spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing these characters (despite Chan being in
therapy). Instead the viewer is simply presented with the cold, hard facts of two men who are each pretending to be
something that they're not as the noose is tightening around both of them. Some may actually prefer the alternate ending
presented as a supplement here to the one actually in the film, which is a bit hard to swallow in terms of what we've seen
gone down between these two moles. The big issue with regard to this Blu-ray is the image quality, which is surprisingly
shoddy at times. But taken as a whole, and with the bombastic audio helping to tip the scales at least a little in the
opposite direction, this release comes Recommended.
This November, Lionsgate will release Infernal Affairs on Blu-ray. This seven-time winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony was the inspiration for director Martin Scorsese's The Departed; Tony Leung (Hard Boiled) stars as an undercover cop involved in a tense ...
