Over twenty years after Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were seen together in the Hong Kong police thriller Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese remade as The Departed for which he won an Oscar, it is almost fitting that writer-director Felix Chong (who incidentally co-wrote Infernal Affairs) should allow himself inspiration from a select few films among many created by Scorsese towards sweeping crime epic equaling those involving riches greed violence done by him overages. So we are talking about The Goldfinger movie.
Henry Ching, played by Leung, is an engineer who comes to Hong Kong at the start of the property boom to make his fortune. He is resourceful by nature and it takes no time for him to become entangled in the wicked world of ’80s real estate development that’s packed with trickster lawyers, over-indulged trust-fund babies, and maybe even some unscrupulous partners. Filled with scenes that recall The Wolf Of Wall Street and GoodFellas, this movie is packed with a level of excess, while Leung’s Ching recalls Jordan Belfort or Henry Hill as he creates an increasingly lavish kingdom on shifting sandbars which now has Lau’s ICAC investigator and his forensic accountants after him.
Just like The Wolf Of Wall Street introduced people who did not understand the high finance of penny stocks and pump-and-dump schemes, The Goldfinger throws viewers into a world of property-market manipulation. Unfortunately, this turns out not to be so much fun. Although we see the results of Ching’s machinations, how he arrives at them remains unclear since various transactions are glossed over. In addition, the jumping chronology hasn’t made things better either: Ching goes from being a destitute engineer to a millionaire within one eye blink.
Sadly though, despite being marketed around their reunion there isn’t much interaction between Lau and Leung – rather like Infernal Affairs – except in just a few scenes together. In terms of cutting between both storylines involving the embezzler as well as the investigator, it seems very one-sided whereby Lau’s upright cop seems underwritten. While Ching’s reckless investments should have set the scene for an exciting cinematic rollercoaster, in the end, it was simply a terrible waste of the audience’s time.
Read The Goldfinger review on Fmovies
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