On DVD: Mad Detective

Could this grisly Hong Kong thriller be the first in a 'Mad' professionals movie series? Might we soon be gasping at the exploits of Mad Plumber, Mad Supermarket Greeter, or Mad Quantity Surveyor? Well, Paul Martin suspects that whichever jobsworth comes next, they have their work cut out for them to be one-quarter as loopy as the title figure of Mad Detective.

As a general rule of thumb, audiences prefer their screen 'tecs to do their crime-busting somewhere off the beaten track. Whether it is Inspector Morse and his brown ale and Mozart, Sherlock Holmes and his Stradivarius and his coke habit, or Duckman and his lascivious wildfowl appetites, we like our gumshoes to be resolute models of individualism. We want men or women (or ducks) who thumb their noses (or bills) at bureaucratic pen-pushing, who gleefully toss the rulebook out of the window, and who get results any which way they can. At what point though, does such admirable eccentricity topple over into full-blown sociopathic lunacy? This was a question touched upon in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, and it raises its head again in Johnnie To and Kai-Fa Wai's Mad Detective, a bloodily off-kilter Hong Kong thriller that regularly seems to be playing somewhat shy of a full deck.

Mad Detective manages to more than live up to its title within the first five minutes, as rookie cop Ho (Andy On) is paired up with Inspector Bun (Ching Wan Lau). We swiftly learn that Bun is a copper who not only likes to get inside his cases (literally in the scene where he zips himself up inside a suitcase and orders Ho to repeatedly toss him down a concrete stairwell, emulating the treatment of a serial killer's victims), but who also has some funny ideas about etiquette (he is discharged from the force for slicing off his own ear in front of a superior). Spin on a few years and Ho is struggling to apprehend a masked murderer, suspected of being missing policeman Wong (Kwok-Lun Lee). Ho seeks out the reclusive Bun and enlists his services in cracking the case, before finding out that his new partner's twanged sanity might render him every bit as great a public menace as the crook they are tracking.

The toils of Ho and Bun constitute one of the more recent offerings from To and Wai's Milkyway Image company (despite Mad Detective only having been released in 2007, the staggeringly-prolific To has found time to direct three pictures since), and theirs is a production stable which is particularly renowned for its stylish and innovative entries into the crime movie arena. And innovative Mad Detective certainly is, with wackster Bun being saddled with the gift of 'seeing' the inner personalities of others. In practice this means that while Ho finds himself stonewalled by police colleague and fishy character Chi-Wai (Ka Tung Lam), Bun can interact with the gaggle of metaphysical presences who suddenly appear when he gazes on the same suspect. It's not wholly unlike Ghost, with Bun taking the Whoopi Goldberg role, or Ghost Town, with the crazy cop subbing for Ricky Gervais.

The relationship between Ho and Bun is nicely played, with the former's attempts to accept the startling quirks of the latter (such as his insistence on communicating with his absent wife) being increasingly undermined by concerns over how dangerous he might be in his own right. The inner personalities narrative gambit is an interesting one, but feels slightly muddled, with Bun's powers seeming to range simply from an enhanced degree of intuition to an all-pervading, pan-dimensional awareness that God himself would be pretty bloody chuffed with. The twists and turns of the plot often come across as similarly confused (the pivotal involvement of Singh Hartihan Bitto's criminal is especially poorly clarified), though this is a fault in common with revered noir outings The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly, putting Mad Detective in exalted company in regards to this particular flaw.

There is real visual flair in To and Wai's direction, with a late top-down shot of a stand-off scenario reflected in the broken mirrored shards littering a warehouse floor achieving a cinéma du look level of ornate artifice. And what it occasionally forfeits in story clarity, Mad Detective compensates for in terms of gritty action and conceptual inventiveness. Besides, would you prefer your screen crimes solved via dogged procedural diligence, or by a one-eared man burying himself in a shallow grave of his own digging? I thought as much.

Rating on a scale of 5 rolls of rubber wallpaper: 3

Release date: Out now
Directed by: Johnnie To, Kai-Fa Wai
Screenplay by: Kin-Yee Au, Kai-Fa Wai
Starring: Ching Wan Lau, Andy On, Ka Tung Lam
Rating: 18
Running time: 89 minutes