The Beast Stalker   Starring: Nicholas Tse, Zhang Jingchu, Nick Cheung and Sherman Chung Cine-Asia RRP: £17.99 SBX464 Certificate: 15 Available 04 January 2010

Sergeant Tong is an intensely dedicated police office, who demands a very high degree of professionalism from his fellow officers. He remains unbending in his pursuit of evil until one day, during a car chase, he unloads his gun into the back of a fleeing car only to discover the dead body of a kidnapped child... an innocent child whom he has killed. Wracked with guilt Tong gets his chance at redemption when the dead child's sister is later kidnapped. If Tong can save her then perhaps he can save his own soul...

The Beast Stalker (2008 - 1 hr, 49 min, 49 sec) is a pulse pounding beast of a thriller from director Dante Lam. The film won five awards and was nominated for a further four.

Tse plays the central role of the tortured policeman trying to make up for past mistakes with a lot of conviction, though the pace at which the film progresses barely gives him time for too much introspection. When we first meet him, as a character, the hard line he takes does little to endear him to the plain clothes unit he heads up. This makes his fall from grace all the more poignant. And when the second girl is kidnapped, the same drive he showed in catching criminals is used in the pursuit of his new prey.

Lem’s direction makes sure that the camera is always on the move and the cutting between the characters blurs the lines between the characters motives. At one point I started to feel sorry for the kidnapper as he was trying to save his own wife. In the end both men engage in questionable acts of violence which I’m sure they could rationalise as being in the common good for their ends. Lem uses flashbacks during the film to slowly reveal that the characters have more in common with each other than they realise: think Hong Kong Crash.

Being predominantly about Tong, Lem wastes no time in developing a love interest between Tong and Ann (Jingchu Zhang), the mother of the kidnapped girl. If anything, she wants him nowhere near the case as she blames him for the death of her first child - pretty reasonable as he did shoot her several times - and also because she feels that he wants that case for his own redemption and not to rescue her daughter. Backing up these main characters is a group of very respectable actors which gives the whole thing a feeling of honesty and quality.

The two disc DVD set is a pretty impressive affair. The film comes with a choice of English and Cantonese 5.1 and a Cantonese 2.0 track with optional English subtitles. The picture has a small amount of grain but is otherwise free from defects. Disc one has a couple of extras in the form of the original theatrical trailer (1 min, 28 sec) and eight extended and alternative scenes of various lengths - there is some interesting stuff here but nothing which is really missed from the finished film.

Disc two is where most of the extras have been hidden. These are grouped into three sections: Behind the Scenes; Making of, and Interviews. In Behind the Scenes you have four sub films. The Car Chases (8 min, 40 sec) looks at the process from storyboard to actual filming the sequences, with lots of behind the scenes footage. Scaling the Sign (6 min, 59 sec) looks at the filming of the sequence. The Street Chase (4 min, 05 sec) likewise shows them filming a sequence and Little Actors (5 min,19 sec) has them filming the children. None of these sequences has any narration but they do demonstrate the filming process. All the extras are in Cantonese with English subtitles.

In Making of (13 min, 58 sec) we have the usual documentary with everybody bigging up the film and discussing their experiences. The last section has various and surprisingly in-depth interviews with Nicholas Tse (16 min, 54 sec), Jingchu Zhang (16 min, 20 sec), Nick Cheung (12 min, 03 sec) and director Dante Lam (13 min, 29 sec).

Like most Hong Kong films the theme here is about good versus evil but, unlike most, the line between the two is deliberately blurred. The film remain well written, directed and acted and should have you on the edge of your seat for the whole ride.

8

Charles Packer