The end of the affair

A word of warning: If you haven't seen the first Infernal Affairs, the highly anticipated sequel Infernal Affairs III, opening today, will be especially confusing. If you have seen the original and the prequel Infernal Affairs II, it will still be confusing, but worth trying to make sense of.

The contemporary police/gangster film Infernal Affairs centers around two duplicitous characters. Andy Lau (劉德華) plays Ming, a triad mole sent to infiltrate the Hong Kong police force; Tony Leung (粱朝偉) plays Yan, a cop deep undercover in the triad underworld. Infernal Affairs II, released just last month, depicts the recruitment of these two as young men while revealing the equally duplicitous nature of their respective elders: Superintendent Wong, played by Anthony Wong (黃秋生), and the triad boss Sam, played by Eric Tsang (曾志偉).

This third and final installment of Hong Kong's most ambitious blockbuster franchise takes place a year after the period of this first film with equal time given to flashbacks taking place a few years prior. The abundant flashbacks allow filmmakers Andrew Lau (劉偉強) and Alan Mak (麥兆輝) filmmakers to bring back three big stars (Leung, Wong, and Tsang) even though all of their characters died in the first film.

One of the major reasons for the first film's success was its surplus of big-name stars. Numerous explicit references to The Godfather Trilogy, Part II introduced the epic aspirations of Infernal Affairs, bringing in more stars for more major characters. Part III ups the ante even further, and accommodating the demands of these new characters is primarily what makes the third installment difficult to follow.

Aside from a bigger role for rising star Chapman To (杜文澤), the new faces in Infernal Affairs III include last year's Golden Horse Award-winner Leon Lai (黎明) and respected Chinese actor Chen Daoming (陳道明).

Lai plays Yeung, the cold-hearted and apprehensive police executive. Chen -- the best actior in Zhang Yimou's (張藝謀) martial arts epic from last year, Hero, in the role of China's first Emperor, plays Shen -- is a Chinese businessman involved in arms smuggling with Sam while also conspiring with Yeung. As he did in Hero, Chen steals every scene he is in here -- even though his character is the least explained and most confusing part of the film.

In the first film, Ming was promoted to the Internal Affairs division to find the triad mole (actually himself) and Part III begins with a committee exonerating him for the bloodshed that left Yan, Superintendent Wong, and another triad mole dead. His next assignment is to continue searching for a triad mole, who has been covering his tracks by systematically executing other moles on the force. Yeung, who holds

clandestine meetings with both Shen and Sam, becomes the target of the IA investigation, with, of course, a strong possibility remaining that the guilty party is Ming himself, even though he longs to become a "good guy."

But the daily suppression of his corrupt past finally proves too much for Ming, and a dominant narrative strand in Part III is his gradual psychological breakdown. We were offered a glimpse into his pathology in the prequel, when the young Ming covets his surrogate mother (Carina Lau, 劉嘉玲) and, in a twist on the usual Oedipal narrative, also has her killed. His madness becomes visualized in hallucinations, evoking more appearances by Leung, as Ming convinces himself that he is also a good guy forced to be bad.