Infernal Affairs (2002): Just as good as its Hollywood remake for different reasons
The stories of Infernal Affairs and its Scorsese-helmed remake The Departed are very similar, but how they go about telling them is fascinatingly different.
Which is better—Infernal Affairs or The Departed? Cinephiles have long struggled to agree on a consensus. The former, co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, is one of the most popular, successful and awards-decorated Hong Kong films of the 21st century. The latter, its American remake, was a critically-acclaimed international hit helmed by master auteur Martin Scorsese, and scored him his first and only Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture. It’s a rare example of a beloved foreign-language film being remade in Hollywood to an exceptionally high standard. We are a far cry from Ghost In The Shell and Death Note here.
The question of which film is better is complicated by the fact that The Departed’s plot is extremely faithful to Infernal Affairs. It’s not as if they are two very different movies. In both, an undercover cop who has infiltrated a criminal gang and an undercover criminal who has infiltrated the cops are tasked with uncovering each other’s identities. The way in which the stories unfold is largely the same, and they even share many near-identical scenes: the climactic rooftop stand-off, the undercover cop stalking his prey in a cinema, the body of a main character thrown from a high rise building. Most of the changes Scorsese has made are generally in the finer details, which help transpose the original’s Hong Kong setting to the Boston, Massachusetts of The Departed. Let’s put it this way: there are no Dropkick Murphys needle drops in Infernal Affairs.
What separates the two films is not what they are about but how they are about it. Martin Scorsese’s version is curious about the emotional consequences of the cop-turned-gangster Costigan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and gangster-turned-cop Sullivan, played by Matt Damon, becoming entrenched in their personas and losing their identities. In Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak are less interested in the internal turmoils of their equivalents, Chan Wing-Yan and Lau Kin-Ming, played by Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Their primary concern is the high stakes cat-and-mouse game between these characters.
The running time of each film is indicative of how differently these filmmakers approach the story. The two-and-a-half-hour long The Departed fleshes out its world of cops and crooks, tries to understand why these characters are drawn to it, and makes space to interrogate the guilt and anxiety brought about by leading double lives. Infernal Affairs tells pretty much the same story in a brisk one hour and forty minutes, and it does so by eschewing the depth and grandiosity of Scorsese’s film for a greater sense of urgency that’s missing from its American counterpart.
Rather than debating which is better, Infernal Affairs or The Departed, maybe the more interesting question is this: what makes these films so uniquely brilliant? The Hollywood adaptation helmed by Martin Scorsese is a shaggy Shakespearean tragedy with an epic sweep. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong original from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak is an energetic thriller throbbing with suspense. Both movies are as good as each other for fascinatingly different reasons. On that, there can surely be a pretty clear consensus.
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Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. Written by Alan Mak and Felix Chong. Produced by Andrew Lau. Starring Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Sammi Cheng and Gordon Lam. Basic Pictures Productions. Distributed by Media Asia Distribution. 101 minutes. Hong Kong.