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Tuesday, April 16, 2024

A GUILTY CONSCIENCE / DUK SIT DAI JONG (2023)

Recent winner at the Hong Kong Film Awards (all-time top local grosser, too), this courtroom procedural, a glossy-looking debut for director Wai-Lun Ng, wins you over with a double prologue that might serve as a pilot for a CBS weekly series, comic supporting characters and all.  Dayo Wong's leading role might well be called Judge Drudge, as he yawns his way thru mind-numbingly petty cases before ditching his job to join a mega-bucks law firm; then yawning his way thru crap cases, including an unwinnable manslaughter charge against a single mom whose child supposedly died from her neglect.  Briskly handled with pacey heightened realism, the actors skirting nimbly ‘round Ng’s odd jerky editing.  But the fun stops once the main story gets up & running as Mainland Chinese political priorities take over and turn the whole drama into a sort of anti-Capitalist Perry Mason episode where we discover Single Mom Louise Wong (from the manslaughter case) was set up to take a fall by the rich, ultra-connected Chung Family dynasty whose scion is the secret father of the child who died and whose jealous wife may be involved.  (And just like Perry Mason, Wong gets on-the-witness-stand confessions as needed.)  Setting the story from 2002-to-2005, before Hong Kong’s independence was severely curtailed from the One China/Two Systems days looks like awfully convenient blame placing.  Guess the fix was in for Mom to take the fall and now the fix is in to give major awards to films that point out past injustice under the old democratic government system when Billionaires, rather than Beijing, were Big Brother.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Though most of the good stuff comes early, Ng pulls off a great shot during the trial, filling the courtroom with members of the powerful Chung clan, all dressed in the exact same style & dark blue color of a conservative business suit.

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