You’d think being an informant for the police would be a fantastic career choice. Constantly playing both sides of the law, living the glamorous snitchy lifestyle in seedy locales, always wondering if your criminal friends are going to discover what you’re up to and silence your squealing ways… but you’d be wrong. And clearly not someone who’s ever watched a movie involving a police informant. (Starsky & Hutch‘s Huggy Bear notwithstanding.) Detective Don Lee (Nick Cheung) is working a case with the help of an informant whose safety he’s guaranteed, but when the sting goes bad the snitch is attacked and left clinging to life. Time moves on and new cases roll in, and soon Lee is looking for a new inside man. He finds that man in Ghost (Nicholas Tse), a recently paroled street racer desperate to free his sister from her life of forced prostitution. Ghost has no interest in the job, but the promise of cash means little sis can stop working on her back. Lee helps Ghost work his way into a gang of brutal jewel thieves, and perhaps not so surprisingly, things don’t go as planned.

I would love to be able to tell you all about the story of Fire of Conscience, only I’m not sure after seeing it I’m qualified to do so. Despite sitting through the entire running time I don’t really know if I fully understand who the different people are and, in some cases, why exactly they were doing what they were doing. In this way the film is rather frustrating, because almost every other aspect is exceptional.

Regardless of my ineptitude to accurately sum things up, Fire of Conscience is pretty much a good cop vs. the unknown rat in the vein of Infernal Affairs. We know that a detective recently trying to cope with the death of his wife is partnered up with another officer who we see at the outset of the film running after his former partner who is chasing down a group of teenage thieves that stole his phone, which seems to have some valuable information saved on it. Post-partnership the two officers try to first track down the stolen phone, for different reasons, and begin to work on a case of a murdered prostitute and two cops whose connective thread is leading to something larger, but each attempt to capture the killer and mastermind seems to uncover that he’s being tipped off by an inside informant.

That sounds….right.

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week to look for films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… Hong Kong!

Foreign Objects travels the world of international cinema each week in search of films worth visiting. So renew your passport, get your shots, and brush up on the local age of legal consent, this week we’re heading to… Hong Kong!