The DVD cover for Triangle says “Three Masters. One Masterpiece.” Triangle does not in fact live up to the hype its cover hopes to generate, but I understand the desire to make a little-known (to Americans anyway) film’s cover eye-catching. This Hong Kong import did pique my interest with its distinction of bringing together three innovative and influential HK directors: Tsui Hark (Zu Warriors, Once Upon a Time in China), Ringo Lam (City on Fire, which inspired Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the underrated twin Jackie Chan comedy Twin Dragons, and Chow Yun Fat vehicle Full Contact), Johnnie To (PTU, Election, and Breaking News).
The primary cinematic appeal of Triangle is invested in the collaboration between these three “masters.” Each director takes the reins on one 30-minute section of this 90-minute film. The trio maintains the same editor and cinematography to ensure continuity but bring their own stylistic choices and cinematic flair to their third. The results are rather disappointing, since with a procession of writers pitching in, the plot and character motivation are interchangeable; each director fine-tunes their personalities and throws a twist or two into an already over-crowded plot until the viewer no longer has any interest in the cast’s survival.
Tsui Hark presents most of the exposition in the first third of Triangle, easily the most enjoyable and least convoluted part of the film. He has a subdued, stylishly elegant yet gritty style of relaying the opening developments, which presents us with tense would-be buddies Sam (Simon Yam), Fai (Louis Koo) and Mok (Honglei Sun), who are prepping for a heist when they are presented with an opportunity to steal a priceless ancient treasure. That’s the gist of it anyway, since Hark keeps the plot moving without resorting to too much needless repetition. The three are quickly embroiled in the fallout from stealing a chest containing the treasure, with Sam’s psychotic wife Ling (Kelly Lin) and her lover, a cop named Wen (Lam Ka-Tung) along for the ride.
Ringo Lam takes over once Sam and Ling find themselves in a warehouse with Wen handcuffed to a door nearby. Lam eschews the caper tone honed by Hark and goes the sentimental route. Sam dances with Ling and imagines she was his first wife, May, who died in a tragic accident. Without revealing anymore of the twists that follow, this section is leaden, with slow pacing and a serious lack of logic on the part of some characters. Motivations are seemingly rewritten on the fly and relationships are similarly adjusted as we begin to pick up pace and head into a quiet nighttime village and the last third of the film.
Johnnie To makes fast work of the last thirty minutes, centered on a shoot-out in an open-air café that quickly grows stale, even as it spills out in a field. To is an able action choreographer, evidenced by his recent film Exiled, which features a gorgeously assembled shoot-out between a security team and a group of gangsters in a dense forest. This is clearly a challenge for him, shooting a nighttime scene that presents a large cast coming together in one massive gunfight. Unfortunately, the excitement just isn’t there, since there’s never any development on the part of the characters, so the danger they find themselves in is just as ephemeral as their lives.
Triangle ends on a curious downbeat note but it’s hard to care after 60 minutes of deadly slow and then needlessly fast procession. This is an interesting experiment, with handsome production values and very good cinematography throughout. As that experiment, Triangle is a success in showing that the talents of these three directors can meld into a single product that does work, on some level. But as a film, a standalone feature that has to answer for its story and characters, Triangle is definitely below average. Recommended for hardcore HK cinema fans.
DVD Bonus Features:
A series of trailers for other Magnolia releases, a 6-minute making-of featurette that continues to tout the film as a masterpiece and a fairly insightful but eventually very boring 13 minutes of footage shot behind the scenes round out the few extras.
"Triangle" is on sale September 15, 2009 and is rated R. Action, Crime-Thriller, Drama, Mystery. Directed by Hark Tsui, Johnnie To, Ringo Lam. Written by Sharon Chung, Kenny Kan, Nai-Hoi Yau, Kin-Yee Au, Tin-Shing Yip. Starring Kelly Lin, Louis Koo, Simon Yam.
