The prolific filmmaker Johnnie To (Election, Mad Detective, Drug War) is known for his skewed yet precise takes on established genre formulas. Unlike the ‘heroic bloodshed‘ of the likes of Ringo Lam and John Woo, To’s crime films are wreathed in moral ambiguity and a wry sense of irony. This approach is personified in PTU, a dark and intimate thriller that presents crime and its alleged prevention as one entwined, corrupt helix. PTU takes the nebulous membrane between cops and criminals of Fritz Lang‘s M and plays it out in crepuscular, millennial Hong Kong over the course of one night.

Shady Sergeant Lo (Suet Lam) loses his gun in the confusion following a gangland assassination. He calls in former colleagues in a Police Tactical Unit to help him track it down. Some of the junior members of the unit insist he report it. However, Sergeant Mike Ho (Simon Yam) won’t contemplate his friend undergoing that level of humiliation and sets about tracking it down. All the while, two rival gangs are about to lurch into full on turf warfare, and the PTU butts heads with other branches of the Hong Kong police as their unofficial investigation impinges on existing cases.

Far from an all-action bloodbath, PTU instead focuses on its protagonists as denizens of a stygian netherworld that’s sown seeds of corruption to varying degrees in every inhabitant, ‘right’ side of the law or otherwise. Character is revealed through reactions to the increasingly absurd events as everyone is pulled to an inevitable collision as if by some unopposable, centrifugal force. There is no one to root for as such. Lo and Mike are no more heroes than gang bosses Eye Ball (Eddy Ko) or Bald Head (Hoi-Pang Lo). But finding out who is going to come out on top is never less than compelling, particularly with To’s remarkable eye for composition picking up a lot of slack for any lack of emotional investment.

It’s a somewhat mockingly masculine affair. What else is Lo’s missing weapon other than a case of symbolic emasculation? Mike’s paternal relationship to his subordinates is occasionally that of a Victorian father, etched in respect and more than a hint of fear. And it is a dead son which lights the touch-paper between the warring gangs. In amongst the testosterone that hangs in the air like the city’s mist highlighted by noir-ish neon, Ruby Wong and To regular Maggie Siu do well to gain a foothold. As officers in rival police units, they often act as stabilising voices of reason, if not always morality.

While To’s relative restraint is admirable, there are times when his patient approach tips over into ponderousness. A few scenes exist solely to hammer home the essential similarity between police and criminals, and there is one scene of the PTU infiltrating a tower block that it needlessly extended. It is odd for a film running at a wham-bam 88 minutes to suffer some longueurs along the way. His precision as a stylist is occasionally also at odds with a narrative driven between confusion and cross-purposes. There are certain contrived coincidences, and his customary moments of absurd comedy aren’t quite as well integrated as they are in the likes of Throw Down and Mad Detective.

Despite some flaws, PTU is an otherwise impressively jaundiced entry into the canon of Hong Kong crime films, like a streamlined version of Andrew Lau and Alan Mak‘s equally cynical classic Infernal Affairs. While its characters occasionally get subsumed into the environment, this is somewhat the point and its a tribute to its stars that broad characters like the buffoonish Lo don’t come across as incongruously outsized. Beholden to nothing other than his own offbeat rhythms, Johnnie To feels like an outlier in Hong Kong crime – more akin to the existential ebb and flow of Takeshi Kitano‘s Yakuza films than his compatriots’ Triad sagas. There are tighter, more complete works in his extensive filmography, but PTU would make a great introduction to his style, not least in an exemplary opening scene which sets up all its players and their motivations over one fateful plate of noodles.

Available on Blu-ray now