The Bullet Vanishes
Lo Chi Leung
The story: A young girl is accused of stealing bullets at a munitions factory and dies by her own hand with a gun handed to her by the psycho boss (Liu Kai Chi). Not long afterwards, people connected to the case start dying – killed by the lethal bullets nowhere to be found. Song Donglu (Lau Ching Wan), the new police administrator of Tiancheng county, and hot-headed ace detective Guo Zhui (Nicholas Tse) have to crack the mystery of the vanishing bullets.

Dead people tell plenty of tales and the success of television’s CSI series proves there is lots of life in the forensic crime procedural.
In Wu Xia (2011), director Peter Chan thrillingly transplanted the idea to olden- day China and mashed it up with the martial arts genre. With The Bullet Vanishes, writer-director Lo Chi Leung (Double Tap, 2000) transports forensic investigation into the warlord era in China and also introduces some interesting characters to hold the viewers’ attention.
We first meet Song as he is swinging by a rope from the rafters in the toilet of a prison facility. He is not attempting suicide though. Rather, the dedicated officer is trying to find out what exactly happens during death by hanging – thus exonerating an accused person. It seems that Song is much too zealous in his job, which means that he makes enemies easily, especially when he is parachuted into Tiancheng county to clean it up.
The eminently likable Lau makes Song someone to root for as he pits his wits against corrupt police, vanishing bullets and a locked-room murder.
Lau is paired with the always intense Nicholas Tse as Guo Zhui, the broody and hot-headed detective who is a sharpshooter and a sharp observer of details.
Chasing after a suspect who has jumped to the street from a window, Guo is able to quickly discern his quarry’s height and weight based on the suspect’s foot imprints. His relationship with con artist Little Lark (Yang Mi) is less believable though, and their romantic interlude feels a little jarring.
What is fun is watching Song and Guo come up with theories for the vanishing bullets, including the very cool idea of creating bullets from ice.
There are even autopsies performed by a pathologist (Hong Kong singer Yumiko Cheng) as she seeks to unearth clues from the bodies of the victims.
The Bullet Vanishes also has a strong sense of place as the armaments factory looks like something out of a Dickensian nightmare with forbidding barbed wire fences and enormous smokestacks belching out thick black smoke. I was briefly distracted though by the use of the exact same location for the prison in this movie and the intelligence outfit headquarters in recent drama The Silent War (2012).
Still, the film is strong enough to be nominated for several Golden Horse Awards, including a nod for Best Film.
Unfortunately, it over-reaches at the end. Lo wants to explore ideas about the nature of justice but he piles on one revelation too many and, regrettably, the final twist is not fully persuasive.
(ST)