Here is a film from Hong Kong's action meister Johnnie To that was entered for competition at last year's Cannes festival. Election is a brassy gangster opera about civil war in the Hong Kong Wo Shing triad, in which competing factions engage in a bloody struggle for control, symbolised by possession of the leadership baton, after the results of its stately "election" are disputed.
It looks great, with a very lurid gallery of Hong Kong villains fighting, drinking and gambling on English Premiership football, and the location work in the city is terrific. But there is a strange lack of life in the story itself, a baffling absence of dramatic charge in any of the principals and no urgent sense of what is at stake between them. The chief gangster is Big D (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), frantically handing out bribes to sway his criminal constituents. He is furious that the popular vote goes to Lok (Simon Yam), a calmer sort of business and family man, more amenable to those who believe the triad should be working more smoothly and discreetly with legitimate commerce and the law. We are plunged into this dispute, but with insufficient time to get to know any of these players, they never fully come to life.
