Protégé

Caught the movie Protégé (Derek Yee and Peter Chan) with V today.

It's a must watch for V because there's Daniel Wu in it. I've got not much of a choice and I will gracefully concede defeat when pit against a formidable foe like Daniel Wu. I can't fight him for V's attention.



I shan't review the movie here per se cause that's not what I usually do here anyway. There might be potential spoilers in this entry so watch out!

The movie reminded me of bits of Trainspotting.

Especially the bits where the director was contrasting the acceptable and unacceptable forms of drug ab/use. People who suffer from depression for example. They rely on Valium, Prozac and other anti-depressants. These are socially accepted drugs. Most people can't get through a day without their regular dose of caffeine. Even for myself, I need drugs to manage my blood pressure.


Andy Lau plays a guy with kidney problems. So unless he gets a transplant, otherwise all forms of medication can only sustain him in the short run. In a scene, he was shown to be administrating a needle for himself under the watchful eye of his wife.

So you contrast that with another couple, desperate for the next hit, sharing the needle leaving their daughter to fend for herself.

Zhang Jingchu plays a single mum who abuses heroin. Her husband left her and her little girl. And she uses the high to temporarily obscure the grind of daily life. The temporal escape provided by heroin is short and how similar is this compared to Andy Lau's kidney problem.

Drug abuse, as Daniel Wu, who plays an undercover cop, puts it, is to curb the empty feeling inside all of the drug abusers. He asked, which is more dangerous, the emptiness that we feel or the act of drug taking.

And in the final scene, the director shows a path of salvation for potential drug abusers. The salvation is family and love. I don't know if this was suppose to be obvious but it came through rather well in the movie. The movie itself was not particularly fantastic. Action scenes were minimal. Louis Koo was real funny. The girl who played Zhang Jingchu's daughter is soooo cute! Zhang Jingchu looks like our Wong Lilin only in the publicity poster.

Watch out for Qi Yuwu in the last scene where Louis Koo was caught for drug trafficking into Singapore. Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore has a death-sentence for drug traffickers. Which if I gather correctly from the movie, could be better off than a life sentence. Andy Lau would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life in prison.