There’s no one out there making them quite like Alan Mak, for better or worse. One-third of the team behind the Infernal Affairs series, along with co-writer Felix Chong and director Andrew Lau, Mak has spent the past 20 years crafting glossy thrillers about expensive men in expensive suits creating complicated schemes to rob each other in expensive rooms. He’d be the foremost chronicler of 21st-century Hong Kong’s conspicuous consumption if he weren’t also the foremost example of it. Movies like the Overheard series (2009-2014), Integrity (2019), and now Under Current feature an all-star cast of aging celebrities going through the convoluted motions of a screenplay built around needless complications and flash that, in the end, leaves you wondering what, if anything, it was all about. More often than not, it turns out to be about nothing at all.
Aaron Kwok plays a defense attorney who, after a crisis of conscience, begins investigating the suicide of a non-profit CFO played by Simon Yam. Yam, it seems, has uncovered some kind of embezzlement or money laundering that someone has been using the NGO for. Francis Ng plays the cop who helps Kwok out (it’s a mostly straight performance by Ng, though Hong Kong’s most reliably weird actor does get some moments to shine in his own inimitable way). Elsewhere, Alex Fong plays Yam’s boss, while David Chiang plays Kwok’s. The Chiang and Fong combination is, of course, a notable reunion of the male stars of Teresa Woo’s Iron Angels, though one doubts that’s what Mak was going for. Instead, they’re more simply a pair of old guys meant to evoke the generation that preceded the Handover, while Kwok and Ng are the stars who came up during the transition from colony to SAR (and beyond). Meanwhile, Felix Lok plays the shadowy villain, and he’s likewise been around forever, with one of his first film roles being in Yim Ho’s New Wave classic The Happening. At this point, a pattern has emerged: none of the male stars are less than 60 years old; all of the women are though.
The screenplay is constructed haphazardly around flashbacks to Yam’s final months as Kwok’s investigation proceeds. It’s kind of fascinating how all the characters know what’s really going on (money is being stolen), but no one knows by whom or for what purpose. Except for the viewers, halfway through, when that ancient Hong Kong bugaboo, the Golden Triangle, is invoked, and the whole thing turns out to be an overly complex drug deal. Or rather, it’s a really simple drug deal that Mak has devised to show us in the most convoluted ways possible. In other words, if you like to see a screenwriter working really, really hard, then Mak is the guy for you.
This still being Hong Kong, Mak does give us a couple of fight scenes, one in the middle and one at the end. Neither is especially remarkable, though it must be noted how truly terrible the special effects in the finale are, even by Hong Kong standards; a silver lining is that the taekwondo showdown immediately preceding this is pretty solidly executed. Still, it seems that all of the money on screen must have been spent on the lens flare budget instead. In the end, Under Current asks the question: What are non-profits really for anyway? If it’s so easy to launder drug money through them, then are they worth it? Left unsaid, but strongly implied, is that maybe these functions are better left to the government. You know, perhaps that friendly one that strongly believes in law and order and censoring motion pictures?
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 4.
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