The film is built upon a clever premise: a triad boss recruits some young members of his gang without priors and ships them off to the police academy. That way he'll have some of his people on the inside to warn him of any impending busts or investigations into his affairs. In the meantime, the police take a promising recruit and kick him out of the academy to serve as an undercover cop. After a carefully-planned bust goes awry, both the police and the triad realize they have a mole.
The undercover cop and the cop who is working for the triad are played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai and Andy Lau, respectively. Tony's one of my favorite actors from his work with Wong Kar-Wai in Chungking Express and In the Mood For Love; most will recognize him as Broken Sword from Hero or from John Woo's Hard Boiled. I've only seen Andy Lau in House of Flying Daggers, and I only saw half of that, so I wasn't too familiar with his work. Both actors are really good in this movie.
The movie this film will draw many comparisons to is Michael Mann's Heat, another film telling parallel but overlapping stories about two men on opposite sides of the law. Like Heat, Infernal Affairs eschews the usual bullets-and-bloodshed angle for a more methodical pace and a character-driven story. There is also an underlying theme relating the trials of the characters to the Buddhist version of Hell.
Infernal Affairs is easily one of the best films to emerge from Hong Kong since the beginning of the milennium. Most of the best and most well-known stars and directors left the country when it was turned over to China, and it's definitely taken a while for the void to be filled.
This film got me started thinking about how Hollywood would screw this up once they decide to remake it (at one time, Richard Gere was going to star in a remake of The Killer, yeesh). I was somewhat dismayed that a remake is in the works, titled The Departed and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. That is, until I saw the director is none other than Martin Scorsese. The film will also star Jack Nicholson and Martin Sheen.
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