The Stool Pigeon

When we last left Dante Lam, he’d just followed up his career-defining Beast Stalker with the anticipated Fire of Conscience. But Beast Stalker was such a resounding leap forward for Lam that the competent but overstuffed Conscience could only be seen as a quiet step backward. Thankfully, Lam’s latest is The Stool Pigeon, a reunion of his Beast Stalker principals — actors Nick Cheung and Nicholas Tse, and writer Jack Ng — and an entertaining and involving Hong Kong film.

The master of the cop soap opera, a uniquely Hong Kong genre, Lam combines morally complex characters and strong action beats into a potent mix. In The Stool Pigeon we get character through action, with relationships forged and broken through chases, gunfights, and bloodshed. Lam has assembled some fine actors: the award-winning Cheung and Tse are joined by multiple award winner Liu Kai-chi and Taiwan’s willowy muse Kwai Lun-mei. After the minor stumble of Fire of Conscience, The Stool Pigeon is a step in the right direction for Dante Lam.

As the title suggests, The Stool Pigeon is about informants, with Nick Cheung playing Inspector Don Lee, an expert at recruiting and using lower-level criminals to bust even more dangerous ones. There’s a dark side to the biz, as witnessed in an opening sequence in which Lee betrays an informant (Liu Kai-chi). Flash forward a year and Lee recruits a new stool pigeon, jailed driver Ghost Jr. (Nicholas Tse), in hopes of bringing down jewelry thieves Tai Ping (Keung Ho-man) and Barbarian (Lu Yi). Ghost Jr. wants nothing to do with the law, but Lee has some powerful tools: money and leverage. Eventually, Ghost Jr. has no choice but to become Lee’s newest informer.

For some stretches, The Stool Pigeon plays like a procedural on the cop-informant dynamic, with Lam showing us the compromises involved in using bad guys to catch other bad guys. Inspector Lee can apply police pressure to get his way, making the stool pigeon less of a partner and more of a slave, and if Lee wants a little more, he can always renege or change the deal. On the flip side, if you betray someone who trusts you, what price must be paid? These are worthwhile themes and Lam and Ng’s script tackles them smartly, making both Inspector Lee and Ghost Jr. into strong and involving characters. Both Cheung and Tse are excellent in their roles, with Cheung once again edging Tse as the efficient yet tortured Inspector Lee.

The Stool Pigeon’s story line is somewhat predictable, and some details and subplots are labored — especially Inspector Lee’s backstory, which goes to exceptional lengths to make his character a tortured one. Furthermore, some of the film’s biggest twists are handed to characters who lack the same generous development as Inspector Lee and Ghost Jr. That uneven focus hurts, but Lam’s execution compensates nicely. The Stool Pigeon has a number of strong action sequences, with the school-set climax proving surprisingly brutal. At its most powerful, the violence in The Stool Pigeon feels like a modern update on ’80s-vintage Ringo Lam.

The China-Taiwan-Hong Kong cast delivers solid performances, with Liu deserving special notice for his gloriously inimitable scenery chewing. However, this is really the Nick and Nic show, with both outshining the whole cast. The action and acting carry the film such that they compensate for quite possibly The Stool Pigeon’s biggest problem: the China co-production compromise, which can make the fates of some characters easy to guess. Still, the filmmakers and actors infuse the situations with enough emotional resonance and kinetic surprise to make the whole package work. If the challenge facing Hong Kong filmmakers is how to work within the mainland Chinese film administration’s confines, then Dante Lam and Jack Ng have succeeded in strong fashion.