The Mission

A crime film set in Hong Kong. There is an attempt on a boss's life. He survives, but where the attack came from is unknown. A protection team of five is put together. None of them knows the others and each comes from a different line: a hairdresser, a nightclub manager, a hitman. The first day is tense. Nobody trusts anybody and the hierarchy is unclear. From there the film is a story of waiting. Waiting in corridors, sitting in a car, eating in a restaurant, and nothing happening. Then an attack comes. In a shopping centre, at night, on a closed floor. That scene is the film's centre. Nobody runs; the five men hold their positions, very few rounds are fired, and the tension comes from stillness rather than movement. What the narrative is interested in is not action but a team: the men grow used to each other over the job, and the film builds that closeness not through dialogue but through empty time spent together. There is a game with a ball of paper. The team passes time waiting in a corridor, and that scene says more about the characters than all the dialogue. Then the job ends and the real matter begins. The boss wants one of the team punished and the decision is left to the others. The production was shot on a very low budget in a short time; the film's static form has to do with that limit as well. Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Roy Cheung, Lam Suet and Jackie Lui are in the cast. Johnnie To directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes static, formalist Hong Kong crime films. Who it is not for: anyone expecting fast gunfights; very little happens through the film and the plot is deliberately thin.