"The Longest Nite," directed by Patrick Yau, (Odd One Dies, The (1997); Expect the Unexpected (1998)) is another film with Johnnie To as producer, and it has his fingerprints throughout. In this movie the hero and villain are pitted against each other in a battle of wits. The hunter becomes the hunted, a very oft used dramatic theme. Tension builds as we travel with the characters to see what the outcome for each chess move will be. People are not what they appear to be. The good guy becomes the bad guy, and sometimes we note how each is dispicable and cold and totally unsympathetic. We root for one and then the other as we are thrown off balance.

These are all classic film noir themes, where the hero is doomed from the the very start. You get that creeping sense that everything is going awry. Incident upon incident rolled into one rushing ball of trouble from which the hero can never escape or recover. Tony Leung becomes a pawn in Lau Ching-wan's game. Everyone is caught in the web of deceit. The viewer is led through a maze of confusion that is as lurid as the cinematography, exemplified in the jail cell scene where Tony looks to get a confession out of Ching-wan, only to be thrown off guard by one of Ching-wan's henchmen, nee cop. The air is filled with dust and cold snow-blue light, where we get the sense that nothing is as it should be. From the onset, the viewer is set up to dislike Tony's crooked cop, but by the time we enter the jail cell we don't know anymore.

To say more would spoil your viewing pleasure. Its as if we were passing a car crash--its ugly, but we just can't take our eyes away from the gruesome scene. Tony Leung puts in another outstanding performance. He has a way of conveying pain and confusion, all in one glance. The climax in the mirror factory, obviously melodramatic, was effective in obscuring and transposing the characters played by Leung and Lau. Suffice to conclude that the fun is in the hunt, not for truth, because nothing seems real, but for the trapped feeling we dread in "The Longest Nite."