A woman has a flat tire in the middle of a one-way street, stopping traffic. A middle-aged man steps out of his car and angrily tells her to drive to the side. The woman, apparently panicked amid the cacophony of horns, insists she has to make a phone call and disappears back into her car. Disgusted, the man drives on the curb to turn into a side street. Soon, a series of little mishaps leads him to a spot in front of a bookstore where a broken cable drops a banner on his windshield. When he yanks the banner, the cable shatters a pane of glass above him. As the man bleeds to death, a slim young man slips away.
Fai (Louis Koo) is an orchestrator of ÒaccidentalÓ deaths. No ordinary hitman, he is neither a martial arts expert nor a sharpshooter.
Nicknamed ÒThe Brain,Ó that's what he is ÐÐ cool, cerebral, always calculating. His associates Uncle, Fatty and the woman assist Fai in his urban installations.
Their instrument of death can be anything; the whole city is their pachinko machine, perfectly tuned to lead their target where s/he needs to be, at the right time. ItÕs
Der Lauf der Dinge, with deadly results.
When Fai is asked to kill a wheelchair-bound old man by the manÕs son, he and the team donÕt ask about the motive ÐÐ insurance money? Is the son tired of taking care of his father? Instead, they set about studying the weather forecast and begin practicing flying kites. They do accomplish their mission, but not without a sacrifice: An out-of-control bus mows down Fatty, after chasing Fai for half a block. When Fai returns home, he discovers his apartment has been broken into, and his world begins to spin out of control. Is someone trying to take him out?
Director Cheang never explains but wraps us in the paranoid mechanism of the assassinÕs mind. There is no telling whether FaiÕs suspected assailant, an insurance agent, has anything on his mind other than his job and his pretty fiancŽe. When Fai lies down fully clothed in his bed, his wife tenderly embraces him ÐÐ we connect her and the fatal car accident of the opening scene only later.
When Fai rents a vacant apartment below the insurance agentÕs unit, we enter his paranoia made visible: He carefully angles mirrors to monitor the front door and sets up a surveillance operation ˆ la The Lives of Others. Chalk lines vein his ceiling to trace the layout of the unit above.
In the end, it turns out to be human errors that have derailed his plans and his sanity ÐÐ one of his own, and another of one of his helpers. Or was it the BrainÕs own feelings that allowed it to happen?
ÐÐ Rika Ohara
Deadly Dominoes
