Looks can be deceiving with Lee Po-cheung’s Gangster Pay Day. Despite bringing together a cast who at first glance seem to be reprising triad-cinema roles, Lee instead delivers a gentle gangland-linked drama laced with an appreciation for local heritage and culture.
Anthony Wong stars as Brother Ghost, a barely literate underworld figure who conceals a warm and cuddly side beneath his tough exterior. Ghost runs a karaoke nightclub and, with partners B (Frankie Ng) and Two (Michael Chan) by his side, keeps drug-dealing out of the venue. That doesn’t sit well with his shady cousin Bill (Philip Keung), who wants to take over the club and steer it toward more lucrative, narcotics-fuelled business.
As Ghost starts to look around for a new trade to get into, his mother dies and, after the funeral, he stops in at an old-style café. When Two causes a commotion, Ghost apologises to manageress Mei (Charlene Choi), who’s also mourning the death of a parent. When she offers him a drink to pick himself up, seeds are sown for not just a possible relationship, but also Ghost’s involvement in running the small diner to sustain it through hard times.
Complications arise on both fronts, however. Ghost’s young right hand man Leung (Wong You-nam) is already hoping to date Mei, and soon Bill is getting in the way again. This time, Bill’s working for a developer who wants to seize the café, and he won’t go easy on Ghost and his men.
Gangster Pay Day was one of several small films in 2014 to play up localism, reflecting the continuing moves among younger viewers to assert a stronger Hong Kong identity. Right from the start, helmer Lee doesn’t hide his intentions to play up highly local angles. When viewers first meet Mei, she’s busy trying to win over diners with a colourful menu of foreign dishes and health food, yet Hong Kong eateries like her Pak Ho Cafe and Cake Shop are only expected to stick to traditional items and do them well. Sure enough, as Ghost and his followers step in to help operate the café, the first priority is to boost the traditional, then adapt slightly for greater success. The local themes extend to social issues, too, including a hot-topic side point on small business being crushed amid a hot property market.
Fans of Hong Kong cinema’s underworld epics can meanwhile see triad-film tropes redeployed in new contexts. Co-stars Frankie Ng and Michael Chan were regulars in triad roles of the 1980s and ‘90s, and in Gangster Pay Daylight in-jokes arise as the pair play nice-guy heavies struggling to make decent buns and scrambled eggs. And even though the film is a Hong Kong-mainland co-production, Lee and Lily He’s script deftly manages to offer triad-cinema material in ways that can pass censorship for cinema play across China yet not feel compromised to those more familiar with the genre.
Performances like those by Ng and Chan, and especially in the pairing of Anthony Wong and Philip Keung, lift Gangster Pay Day by complementing the screenplay’s quirky blend of goofy humour, light drama and far darker turns. Some of the material in the script is routine – take the arrival of a love triangle and the inevitability of a showdown between the two cousins – but other turns offer nifty surprises. Gangster Pay Daymay not deliver the full-on triad trouble sought by genre fanatics, but it entertains all the same with an offbeat, hybrid approach that manages to present old standards in refreshing new forms.