The Stool Pigeon

Dante Lam

The story: Senior inspector Don Lee (Nick Cheung) enlists illegal street racer Ghost Jr (Nicholas Tse) to be his informant in order to nab the criminal Barbarian (Lu Yi). Ghost signs on as the driver for a planned heist and starts to feed Don with information. Matters become more fraught when Ghost realises he had previously crossed paths with Barbarian’s woman (Guey Lun-mei). Meanwhile, Don has his own demons to deal with.

They may be on opposite sides of the law but copper Don Lee and hoodlum Ghost Jr are really the same – they are both the walking wounded.

Don’s last promotion was for a successful drug bust, the result of an informant’s tip-off. That stool pigeon was found out and turned into a sitting duck as enraged gangsters tracked him down and hacked at him with choppers.

The guilt Don felt for being rewarded while failing to protect his source set off a chain of events that would further scar him emotionally.

As for Ghost Jr, life does not seem to have given him much of a break and the only thing he knows is cars and the world of illegal racing. While he is wary of Don’s offer to be an informant, he really has no choice.

He needs the money to save his sister, who has been pimped out to repay his father’s debt to loan sharks, so he agrees to be Don’s informant even though he does not trust him. Squeezed on every front, his is a lonely existence.

The pleasure here is in watching Nick Cheung and Nicholas Tse portray these two characters.

Roiling beneath Don’s placid exterior as a responsible and methodical cop are surging waves of rage and remorse that threaten to overwhelm him. Eventually they do in a bloody and shocking finale. And you see that arc clearly in Cheung’s portrayal.

He is matched by Tse, who has been a consistent scene-stealer in the recent ensemble films Hot Summer Days (2010) and Bodyguards And Assassins (2009). He finds a sweet, low-key vulnerability to the knocked-about Ghost Jr, particularly when he makes a connection with Guey Lun-mei. It is also nice to see her breaking out of the mould to play messed-up and ferocious for once.

Since it is Dante Lam at the helm, this is no sedate character study but a tense thriller with several taut action sequences worked in. This is familiar ground for the director who gave us Fire Of Conscience (2010) and The Sniper (2009).

Here, there is an emotional heft to all the brawling and battering. As Don and Ghost Jr become increasingly bruised, it is as if their damaged psyches are manifested physically.

Cheung and Tse had previously worked with Lam on the well-received action thriller The Beast Stalker (2008) and this is clearly a winning combination. In that collaboration, Tse was the guilt-wracked cop and Cheung, the sympathetic villain.

For his efforts, Cheung won both the Golden Horse and Hong Kong Film Critics Society’s Best Actor awards. If that was any indication, The Stool Pigeon could well be sitting pretty come awards time.

(ST)