The Longest Nite

Wai Ka-fai in person! Deepest, darkest film noir, slick as the 70’s and mean as a snake, director Patrick Yau’s THE LONGEST NITE is a diseased hybrid of Orson Welles’ LADY FROM SHANGHAI and his TOUCH OF EVIL. Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a corrupt cop on Macau, and when two warring Macanese gangs sit down for a negotiation and its up to him to keep the simmering tensions down to a dull rumble. Then the hitman (Lau Ching-wan) shows up. Ominously bald-headed, tattooed, and carrying a bowling bag Lau Ching-wan starts crossing Tony’s field of vision, making deliveries, taking phone calls, delivering veiled threats. He’s the chaos Tony’s trying to control and the two start tweaking each other’s volume knobs, until whatever else they were doing falls by the wayside and they start trying to squash one another like bugs. Originally, Yau directed five scenes of this film before hitting a creative brick wall, and director Johnnie To and producer and writer Wai Ka-fai stepped in to shuffle and reshuffle them into a stunning dead man’s hand. This is film noir at its most stressed out.