When we talk about the great modern masters of action cinema, Johnnie To’s name doesn’t come up nearly as often as it should. To’s been part of the Hong Kong scene since the 1980s, but he’s really entered a new level of international attention and acclaim in more recent years with heroic bloodshed pictures like Exiled and Vengeance and thrillers like the Election duology and Drug War. When To is on his game, there are few living directors able to match his skill with tension, atmosphere, or his poetic eye for violence and bloodshed.
When To is off his game, you get Three.
A sporadically entertaining but mostly limp misfire, Three, now available on home media, has all the ingredients for the sort of nailbiter at which To so frequently excels, but those ingredients never come together in any kind of satisfying way.
Three is centered around, and takes place mostly in, a recovery ward in a hospital. Neurosurgeon Dr. Tong Qian (Zhao Wei) is grappling with a surgery that didn’t go as well as hoped, causing feelings of guilt and doubt that are leading to further problems during her surgeries. The worst day of her life gets worse when detective Ken (Louis Koo) arrives with a gangster, Shun (Wallace Chung), who has been shot in the head.
It seems something went wrong during an interrogation, leaving Shun alive but with a bullet in his head. Shun refuses surgery to remove the bullet, and also refuses to divulge any information about his criminal cohorts. So the board is set for the game between the cop, the crook, and the doctor.
Except no game is really to be had. The film just cycles through the same character beats (The doctor freaks out because the crook won’t let her operate! The cop seethes! The crook smirks and makes smug comments!) over and over again for something like 75 minutes of its 90-minute runtime.
The entire film takes place in the hospital, and mostly just one room in that hospital, so my assumption during the early parts of the film was that To was carefully establishing the geography of the building so that all sorts of tricks and traps and action could play out to dizzying satisfaction once the film gets going.
But Three never really gets going. I don’t know, man; To can spin tension with the absolute best of them (and if you don’t believe me, go watch Drug War. It’s the cop movie David Fincher wishes he could make), but Three barely even tries. There are no tangible goals for any character to work toward, no mystery to be unraveled piece by piece. It really is just a bunch of people waiting around for the last act of the movie to arrive.
When it does arrive, the big action climax is as seamlessly choreographed as you would expect from To, and he deploys a pretty innovative methodology to depict the chaos of the gun-battle. But it’s too little too late, and the film then rushes to the real climax, which is a bunch of uninteresting characters gesturing wildly in front of a terrible green screen effect.
And maybe those uninteresting characters are the real death knell for Three. There’s no one to hang onto or invest in, not even as an antihero that you hope to see redeemed or destroyed, or a villain that you love to hate. The characters are either boring or flat-out unpleasant, so there’s no real excitement to watching them circle each other.
You can’t blame the actors for the situation. Wei and Chung both seem like strong performers, and Koo is a naturally riveting presence, so sublime in Drug War, SPL II, and the Election films. The script just isn’t there for them, and their attempts to wring pathos or tension out of it never take off the ground.
Three isn’t offensively bad or anything, it’s just a misfire from a filmmaker that has more than proven a huge range of talent. Johnnie To makes a lot of movies, and by sheer numbers some of those movies probably aren’t going to be all that great. It’s a shame, but it only means that the next time To really connects with his material will be all the more satisfying.