Mo jing

After the brilliant Unbeatable, Dante Lam returned to his ambitious “psychological” action thrillers. Unfortunately, the well-deserved commercial and critical success of the previous film, whose script had been simmering for several years, did not teach him any lessons, but instead resulted in the downfall of the impression that he is a genius. How else could one understand the entirely dysfunctional and carelessly dashed-off screenplay of That Demon Within, which is fleshed out into a bombastically pompous mishmash with futile pretentions of depth. The basic problem with this film, as well as with some of Lam’s previous opuses (particularly The Viral Factor), consists in the fact that, unlike progressive Western genre mash-ups, it doesn’t incorporate well-though-out or at least distinctive characters into the action narrative, but instead attempts to psychologise characters that basically remain one-dimensional genre stereotypes. Similarly, the psychologising itself is not done through detailed depiction of the characters or by adding realistic motivations, but only through the use of kitschy scenes, which are usually in the form of spectacularly rendered flashbacks. However, the advertising aesthetic of kitsch definitely does not add depth to the given character, but rather flattens it even further. The action scenes are also similarly paradoxically ineffective, as they seem to be an effort to follow in the footsteps of Ringo Lam, who conceived of action not as spectacle for its own sake, but as a catalyst for the relationships between the characters. The action in That Demon Within is thus always somehow linked to the central character and his peripeteias, but it misguidedly and counterproductively gets swept up in the bombastic spectacle that overpowers any possible emotional impact of the given sequence with a superficial wow effect. Dante Lam represented hope for Hong Kong genre cinema six years ago and actually lived up to his reputation at least in terms of craftsmanship and filmmaking ambition, but unless he engages in some introspection soon, there is a risk that in the coming years his ambitions will slide into the misguided refining of a style that in the meantime will become an overwrought cliché of his own making. (24.08.2014)