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Edmund Lee

1/5 stars
If there is one thing that Suspect director and co-screenwriter Sam Wong Ming-sing should learn to become a better filmmaker, it’s that less can very well be more.
An experienced martial arts director who was once a leader in the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, Wong (Choy Lee Fut) has come up with enough incongruous story ideas and flashy visuals in his latest directing effort to fill three movies – although it would be a struggle for most viewers to sit through just this one.
A pulpy, inconsistent and often laughable blend of fantasy action and murder mystery, Suspect features an outlandish vigilante anti-hero, some epic revenge plots, a whole lot of wacky dives into the “subconscious”, and at least two psychological gimmicks that play like magic.


One of these superhuman conditions – hyperthymesia, an extreme version of photographic memory – belongs to master sleuth Kwok Man-bun, played by Hong Kong crime drama veteran Nick Cheung Ka-fai with a nod and a wink that suggest he realises this is all a lot of nonsense.
In a series of highly stylised and utterly stupid set pieces, Wong shows us Kwok’s journeys into his own imagination; these play like a costume party attended by several Nick Cheungs, each one dressed for a different personality. While it’s never clear how these vignettes help him solve his cases, they do look unintentionally funny.

When we first meet Kwok, he is a former police detective who has quit the force after a traumatic incident in which his twin brother was murdered in front of him and his memory somehow failed at the key moment.
He is brought in from the cold when a bizarre murder case claims a morally questionable member of society and an employee at a video game company, May Chou (Zhang Yishang), turns herself in, specifically asks for Kwok, and foretells more ritualistic killings of other bad apples to come.
Although Suspect introduces us to a mythical serial killer called the Ghost Judge, and indulges in computer effects to illustrate how the victims are punished by supernatural forces, it becomes obvious almost too quickly that all the film’s fantastical scenes take place solely in the minds of characters under hypnosis.

As Kwok tracks down the actual culprit while fighting his own demons on the side, Suspect continues to bombard its audience with more genre clichés than most self-respecting filmmakers would choose to play with.
For Hong Kong cinema fans, it may at least be worth noting that the cast also includes Niki Chow Lai-kei as Kwok’s psychotherapist, Patrick Tam Yiu-man as his police colleague, and Michael Tong Man-lung as a shady hypnotist who promises to return in a bigger role should this sorry production ever spawn a sequel.
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Less is more is the lesson director Sam Wong should take away from his latest film, a blend of murder mystery and action fantasy that’s pulpy and inconsistent
Nick Cheung plays a former detective with unusual powers who is recalled to solve a murder that’s been claimed by a woman who’s threatening more killings


Director Sam Wong has tried to pack too much into Suspect, and the result is an incoherent mess. Playing a detective with unusual powers, Nick Cheung endures some frankly stupid set pieces.


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Review | Suspect movie review: Nick Cheung plays detective in laughably incoherent psychological thriller