Would you accept the fists of justice from this man?
(誤判)
dir: Donnie Yen
2025
Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.
But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.
The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.
Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.
Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.
Donnie Yen is in his 60s, but I guess that doesn’t mean his character has to be in his 60s too, and while that may sound implausible, we haven’t really even gotten close to the aspects of this that make it seem less based in the real world than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
On his first case as prosecutor, Fok is meant to be prosecuting a young guy to whom drugs were sent in the mail. He claims at first that he just let someone else ‘borrow’ his mailing address, and he had nothing to do with the importation of the drugs.
Two defence lawyers pressure the young chap, Ma Ka-Kit (Mason Fung) into pleading guilty for a lesser sentence, to which he initially agrees, but he then changes his mind when he finds out that he’ll still do 10 years or so. That seems pretty rough to someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, but then it would seem pretty rough to a guilty person too.
The kid’s granddad, Uncle Ma (Lau Kong) routinely beats people in order to extract justice, and no-one even criticises his actions, because of their deep reverence for old people. Fok admires him so much, and is so moved by the humbleness of his living circumstances that he leaves a bunch of money for him under some papers
Throughout all of this, with absolutely no evidence, Fok is convinced that he shouldn’t be prosecuting this kid for this crime, and yet there’s nothing presented as to why he would think that as yet. Of course it comes later, but at this stage you’re wondering why, since he has no legal basis for his opinion, he’s going on about it. His co-workers think he’s incompetent, the head of the office of prosecutions at the Department of Justice thinks he’s an idiot, and no-one supports him, or complements him on how handsome he is, ever.
The only people that believe him are his former cop co-workers, who still do everything he says, even if he hasn’t worked with them for 8 years. If someone I worked with moves on, I’ve usually forgotten their names after about five. And if they called me up for a favour I’d be like “who the fuck are you again?”
Thanks to Fok’s entirely bizarre court room antics, which often involve the defence and prosecution lawyers, in horsehair wigs and gowns yelling in English to emphasise Important Points, the ‘kid’ gets sentenced to 27 years instead of the 10 he was going to cop.
Harsh. The system is harsh, but the system works. Bizarrely, again, Fok constantly has violent run-ins with people, with gangs, with all sorts of crims, and of course beats the crap out of them all, because he’s Donnie Yen, but you wonder, since this is based on a supposedly true story, whether there recently was a prosecutor in his 60s who beat up hundreds of people in the pursuit of someone he was meant to be prosecuting, because he so believed in truth, justice and the Hong Kong / Chinese way.
You could be smelling what this film is cooking right about now: in the past, in Hong Kong, you might have had stories about corrupt cops, corrupts senior officials, corrupt lawyers, corrupt members of government. But not now, oh no not now. Now every script is vetted by the Hong Kong Film Censorship Authority through the Office of Film, Newspaper and Article Administration, who decide if something can be shown, or not.
Key within all the criteria that justify what they do (against what filmmakers want to do), is some censor having to ‘decide’ whether “the exhibition of the film would be contrary to the interests of national security.”
That is applied in such a way that anything that could be perceived as impacting on national security (and in case you’re wondering, they’re not talking about Hong Kong), as in, if you depicted corrupt government officials, corrupt cops etc, that could give Chinese citizens the impression that there are some government officials that are corrupt. And we cannot have people thinking that, because that would mean that members of the Communist Party of China are corruptible.
And that wouldn’t do. Like the Pope, members of the Party are infallible. They can do no wrong, ever. No Party member has ever done anything less than wrong. Even Mao, who killed tens of millions of his own people through ignorance or indifference, never did anything wrong.
So no cops do anything wrong or against the law in this flick. None of the prosecutors, working as they do for the State, do anything wrong. The judges who don’t care about the results, and who drink $10,000 bottles of wine don’t do anything wrong.
The only people who do anything wrong, as in commit crimes, are obvious crims, and a fair few foreigners thrown in to boot. Of the lawyers that are obviously corrupt, they are professional lawyers outside of the government sphere. Only lawyers working for themselves could be corrupt. Never for the government.
Why is this particularly galling, to me, in this instance? Well, the notion that there are prosecutors in Hong Kong now, right now, who see Justice as a bright shining light that must be applied without fear or favour, and shared widely and freely, to the benefit of all, in a place where people are routinely convicted for protesting for civil freedoms from the Party masters far away in Beijing before they’re even arrested is fucking ludicrous. This terrible legal drama is little more than propaganda for the State, reassuring a dulled populace that the State is always correct and always does the right thing. The innocent are avenged, the guilty are jailed, and the citizens can just go back to trusting that their masters have their best interests at heart.
It would be galling coming out of any nation, but coming from an authoritarian state, well, it’s extra insulting for me.
Donnie Yen, who’s getting old, who’s getting to that stage where even his on screen personas say things like how they’re getting too old to beat up hundreds of people at a time, wanted to make something that presumably wasn’t wall to wall action. He wanted to do something dramatic, where he would talk more with his mouth than with his fists. And yet this dull legal drama doesn’t have confidence in the quality of the dramatics onscreen, hence the regular action interludes where Donnie truly shines. And yet even they’re not without their faults. Lot of stunt people sitting in for Donnie these days. The fights are over a bit quicker, as well.
Donnie has been mocked / celebrated as being an absolute titan of a fighter for decades, but someone who’s maybe a bit wooden in his performances. He’s fine, of course, but there are some scenes involving wooden furniture or wall panelling where he’s a bit out of his league. He maybe should have had a word with his director, who might have been able to give him some acting tips.
Oh wait, no, that wouldn’t work. He’s the director. He made sure this toed the party line, and, like any successful actor in Hong Kong or China, to continue to be so, he has to say what the Party demands. There’s no such place as Taiwan. There have never been protests about anything in Hong Kong. Nothing happened at Tiananmen Square. The Party is Good, the Party is Great, we surrender our will, as of this date.
But he sure does look noble playing heroes in films, doesn’t he?
5 times even I know the rules of evidence don’t work like that out of 10
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“I think our work is like an eternal brilliant light. We should convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.” – I wonder why no one else has proposed this as a solution to ALL of the problems of the legal system, namely, that it protects the wealthy without constraining them, and constrains the poor without protecting them, but then I’m not as smart as the makers of this thinly veiled Party propaganda - The Prosecutor
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