ELECTION 2 REVIEW

Remember in BLUE VELVET when Kyle MacLachlan comes home from his date with Laura Dern only to encounter a battered, naked and brutalized Isabella Rossellini staggering out of the dark, barely able to speak? Whenever I think of Hong Kong these days I think of it as Isabella Rossellini in that scene.

Hong Kong has Disney screwing them on one end and without universal sufferage they've got China screwing them on the other. In recent weeks the new Chief Executive has given interviews dismissing critics of his new budget in language that one normally only heard in China back in the 70's and the UN has issued a blanket condemnation of Hong Kong's human rights situation which has been dismissed out of hand by the local government. Hong Kong seems to be screaming as loud as it can and everyone in power is just patting it on the head as they lead it to the slaughterhouse. Who would have thought that the person to make a movie about this would be Johnnie To? But that's exactly what ELECTION 2 is: a savage, funny, pitch black vivisection of Hong Kong politics.

Picking up two years after the last election in the Wo Sing triad, we find our triads sitting pretty on a mountain of money. Lok (Simon Yam) has, like Caesar, brought two years of pax triadica and even the Uncles (the retired brothers who sit around playing cards all day and whose approval is crucial) have been able to spring for new sweaters, shoes, fancier cigars and some nice hair products. Jimmy (Louis Koo) is building a logistics center in China that will be his giant step from well-heeled bootleg VCD mogul to legitimate businessman. Jet (Nick Cheung) is mostly in hiding, popping out every now and then to rub someone out for Lok, but otherwise cooling his heels in a nearly-bare apartment with ambition curdling in him like poison.

Now the new election is coming and, as we all know, elections bring out the worst in Lok (as the movie reminds us in a tribute to the original's infamous fishing scene). When we left him at the end of ELECTION, it was evident that Simon Yam's Lok wasn't the cool, peace-loving big brother he appeared to be, but a bloody maniac and now his sick desire to hang onto the chairmanship for two more years causes his insanity to bleed out of his pores like greasy sweat. China's Security Bureau has a hand in all this, as well, and they seem to be the sickos who are standing just offstage in the shadows, pulling the strings.

Unlike ELECTION, which at least built sympathy for Lok's team until it pulled a switcheroo in the last third, ELECTION 2 has no sympathy for anyone. The characters are soaked in gore up to their elbows and none of them has an ounce of pity or humanity left in the burned out little piles of ash that were once their souls. This would make for tough going, but fortunately To has the violence set to simmer in the first half of the film - you know something awful is going to happen but it's not happening yet. As the players position their pieces the tension gets so thick you can barely breathe and when the violence does come - and believe me, it does - you don't know whether to be sick or relieved.

Nick Cheung doesn't get a cool moment in this film the way he did in ELECTION, but he still manages to demonstrate that there's a terrific actor beneath all that schtick just crying to get out. This movie's revelation is Mark Cheng. At one time a standard fixture of the Hong Kong movie scene in flicks like PEKING OPERA BLUES, RAPED BY AN ANGEL and CHINESE TORTURE CHAMBER 2 he's only been in one film since 2000 and it's like having your long-lost cousin come through the door when he gets out of the car in ELECTION 2 and makes his grand entrance. Playing a professional sadist running a Gitmo-style torture camp with a continually updated bill for services rendered scrolling through his head, he's a welcome relief and his unwillingness to betray those who're paying his bills comes across like the highest moral fibre in a film where everyone betrays everyone else at least twice.

As bleak as an alcoholic clown at a children's birthday party, ELECTION 2, like Louis Koo, holds itself in check until its ending when things, remarkably and unexpectedly, get even more horrible and depressing. The image of Hong Kongers eating their young at China's command is the kind of thing that'll stick in your brain for a long time to come. Nevertheless, I imagine it's going to do quite well in Hong Kong. As the film launched itself at the throat of the PRC and said the things that everyone in Hong Kong is thinking the packed audience at last night's screening burst into cheering, wild applause, foot stomping and laughter and just on that basis alone I imagine the box office here will be brisk.

I don't want to give the impression that the movie is solely concerned with political points, but watching it with the current events unfolding as they are, with June 4th on the horizon, and with a hometown audience who lapped up the political jokes like warm milk, it's hard not to focus on them. But, really, the politics are merely one of the lingering tastes you're left with. There's also violence, black humor, good acting, very very dark photography, and more violence. And did I mention violence? More compact, tightly structured, and darker than ELECTION, ELECTION 2 is the year's nastiest, bravest, most accomplished movie, doing in two hours what a million strident DV docs about human rights could never accomplish. He'd rather die than admit it, but I get the feeling that Johnnie To loves his hometown and that this is his way finding where the guy who attacked it lives, and wading into his living room with a baseball bat in hand to settle a few scores.