My favourite film

My favourite film at the moment is a Hong Kong action movie called Breaking News. It's not a particularly amazing film, but it has set something in motion inside my fastidious brain. It's the film that made me conscious of one Hong Kong cinema's most significant features, which is the humanity of the "bad guy". In Hollywood action films the bad guy is normally ultra evil. I guess it's because the good guy is normally such an idiot (i.e. Die Hard with Bruce Willis as a cop who's got a drink problem, can't keep his marriage together, and can only do one part of cop-work properly, which is shoot bad guys and anyone in the vincinity) that if the bad guy had any redeeming qualities he would automatically be better than the good guy. But in Hong Kong movies the bad guy is sometimes better than the good guy, or at least the moral distinction is often blurred.

Breaking News is an example of this. The film begins with the Hong Kong police force being publicly humilliated after their unsuccessful attempt to foil a high-stakes robbery is broadcast on live television. In order to overcome this very public humilliation, the police decide to turn the hunt for the criminals into a very public media event. As the film progresses I instinctively began to sympathise with the criminals. Their honesty and humane care for one another (and even their hostages) compares favourably with the cynical police whose main concern is to create a spectacle for the media, distort facts and score a PR coup by hunting down these humane robbers like wild animals.

This makes me wonder whether Hong Kong could do a better job of talking about terrorism than most Western cinema has been able to. Hollywood's extremely bad terrorist (or the misguided Arab youth who deep down loves America) may satisfy people who know nothing about the plight of the Palestinians or who learnt about Jihad from PS3. For the rest of us it would be nice to see a more nuanced representation of terrorists, see them as human beings and really get an understanding of what motivates them.

Oh, and by the way, you can download Breaking News here.