Mad Detective: The Masters of Cinema Series

Introduction

Bun is a brilliant detective, who always gets results as he can 'see' people's inner personalities - the voices that urge them on and hold them back appear as characters - and can tell what drives them on and who they really are.

We first meet Bun (Lau Ching Wan) repeatedly stabbing a pig carcass and asking his partner Ho (Andy On) to seal him in a suitcase and throw him down a flight of stairs. He emerges and promptly announces who the killer is. As his methods work, Bun's erratic behaviour is tolerated until he slices off his ear and offers it to his chief as a leaving present.

Five years later, off the force and with a prosthetic ear, Bun is contacted by Ho to help him solve the disappearance of a cop 18 months ago, whose gun has been used in several robberies.

Video

The picture is excellent and shows Johnny To's amazing visual style well. The editing is amazing, doing a great job of showing us what Bun sees.

Flesh tones are excellent, blacks are deep and colours are good - this isn't a disc that you would pick to wow your friends and family, but the quality is superb.

*The pictures contained in this review are from the DVD and do not reflect the image quality of the Blu-ray Disc.*

Audio

There are four Cantonese soundtracks: DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Stereo, so something for every system. They are all extremely impressive, especially the HD audio options, which really come to life at the end, putting the 'surround' into surround sound.

I'm quite pleased that they resisted the temptation to do an English dub, but the subtitles are excellent.

Extra Features

These concentrate more on Johnny To's career than on Mad Detective - the 33 minute Q&A with Johnnie To at the Cinémathèque Française took place just after a screening of The Mission and Mad Detective is only fleetingly mentioned. This is also the case with the 21 minute Interview with Johnnie To, which covers different material, but not this film. The co-director and past collaborator, Wai Ka Fai, isn't even mentioned.

The 16 minute Cast Interview took place at the Udine film festival in Italy and is a general chat with actors Lau Ching Wan and Lam Suet.

These are all well edited, cutting out the translation lag, are in Cantonese and French with English subtitles.

There is also the UK trailer and supposedly a 16-page booklet containing a new essay by David Bordwell, but the review copy did not have this.

Conclusion

You normally see inner personalities depicted in cartoons as an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, but this takes it to a whole new level, as people are shown with many different sides to their characters - up to seven in one case, including a gluttonous coward and a power-dressing assertive woman. There's also something about flawed law-enforcement officers making a snappy title: Bad Lieutenant, Violent Cop and now Mad Detective!

I'm no expert on Asian cinema, but I was surprised that I've never heard of Johnny To before, despite his oeuvre comprising over 30 films! I'm glad I was given the opportunity to watch this and it's a fine title to mark the Masters of Cinema Series' first foray into Blu-ray.

Johnny To was quite deprecating of his own writing ability in the extra features, but the screenplay is arguably one of Mad Detective's strong points. The characters are well drawn and what could have been a simple buddy movie, like Lethal Weapon, takes unexpected turns, leaves you behind for a bit and forces you to catch up in time for the fantastically bewildering ending.

Despite the rather disappointing and irrelevant extra features, this disc comes highly recommended.