Another day, another triad elegy: it’s as if the Hong Kong film industry has some sort of secret contest running—who can churn out the most self-serious underworld operas before anyone in the audience wakes up with genre fatigue. Wong Jing’s “A True Mob Story” arrives trumpeting its authenticity, as if it expects us to genuflect before “the truth,” and then blithely hands us the same old battered deck of loyalty, brotherhood, and doom that’s kept multiplexes in business since the first shirtless gangster picked up a butterfly knife.
You have to marvel at Wong Jing’s chutzpah: titling your film A True Mob Story is like slapping an “organic” sticker on a box of instant noodles. What makes this any truer than last week’s bloodbath? The antiseptic lighting? The extra-pouty Andy Lau? The familiar pilgrimage from violence to redemption, with obligatory pit stops for betrayal and oracular speeches about fate? If you’re hoping for earth-shattering revelations or a new take on the worn-out dance of crime and consequence, you’ll be sipping tepid tea at the world’s dingiest cha chaan teng.
But then there’s Andy Lau. There’s always Andy Lau, isn’t there? That implacable matinee idol, forever looking like he’s sung sad songs by the docks and then gone off to win a fistfight—his face the only thing you can set your watch by in this twitchily derivative world. It’s to Lau’s credit—maybe his curse—that even when the script hands him reheated melodrama, he chews with such seriousness you’re half-tempted to believe there’s substance in the gristle. His Cheung Dee, stoic and battered, is the grown-up in a roomful of teenagers; he wears regret the way other gangsters wear sunglasses. It’s a genuine performance in a world of counterfeit bills.
Against him, the supporting cast pirouettes and crumbles. Gigi Leung, as the crusading attorney who moonlights as the audience’s moral compass, is all trembling idealism—though you suspect she’d prefer a night out with Anita Mui than another round of trial-by-bad-dialogue. Alex Fong’s cop, haunted by conflicting bourgeois dreams, is stuck somewhere between hard-boiled and overcooked. Mark Cheng, as Prince—Prince! Only in Hong Kong do triads get names like Bond villains—slithers through the proceedings with the smugness of a man who’s learned the word “suave” but skipped the page on “nuance.” And Ben Ng is on hand to remind us what happens when vengeance stops being poetic and starts being clinical—his Crazy Ball is all id and amyl nitrate, rampaging through the film like a rabid TikTok influencer.
Wong Jing, never one for subtlety when he can lob another neon-lit grenade into the frame, tries to recast the hoary triad morality tale as something like an existential crisis. Can a good man thrive amid the rotten roots of empire? Or does the city grind us all into the same gray paste? But these are questions with answers already embalmed in the genre’s mausoleum. For all its mutterings about brotherhood and fate, “A True Mob Story” plods the John Woo road—dodging nothing, risking nothing, as if the spirit of Hong Kong cinema lives in recycled squibs and not in real risk.
It’s pretty to look at, I’ll give him that. There’s a certain pleasure in watching the film’s sleaze-glitz version of 1990s Hong Kong—a city that always looks like it’s recovering from yesterday’s party and limbering up for tomorrow’s shoot-out. The costumes and slick surfaces feel right, even if the emotions rarely do. But where John Woo found battered lyricism in the mayhem, Wong Jing too often slides into the mechanical and—worse—the exploitative. Violence as punctuation, vulgarity as perfume; the familiar Wong Jing specialty. There’s a pornography of suffering here that’s supposed to shock but only saps—because we’ve seen it all so many times, and often with sharper choreography and more honest heartbreak.
It’s the moments between the carnage that almost make you care—a fleeting look from Lau, a resigned half-smile, a moment where you sense the actors longing for a better film. But the screenplay, like a nervous gambler, never bets the house on actual feeling. Instead, it folds, again and again, back into cliché. By the time we limp to the final reel, the so-called “truth” has vanished, replaced by a kind of safe, market-tested fatalism; the sort that made triad films the fast food of post-handover Hong Kong. Greasy, filling, and always a little dissatisfying.
What does “A True Mob Story” offer, beyond a checklist of genre obligations? Not much, unless you count Lau doing more heavy lifting than Atlas—his performance punctuating every lull, yanking the film onto steadier ground, and almost making you forget that nothing else in this movie has the nerve to surprise you. It’s a mob story that flatters the audience’s nostalgia, never its intelligence. For every flash of grit, a yard of tinsel; for every stirring showdown, the numbing thud of preordained tragedy.
You leave the theater not enraged, not moved, but with a familiar, humming numbness—like the aftermath of too many cigarettes and an all-night mahjong game. That’s the real truth you won’t find in the title. Wong Jing delivers his brand of authenticity the way Coca-Cola delivers “original” taste: by preserving what everyone already recognizes and quietly removing anything that might disturb your palate.
A true mob story? Give me a false one: at least the lies would have style.
