Watches
March 03, 2021
A bland courtroom thriller. Hong Kong has a film industry with strengths and weaknesses and serious drama isn't one of its strengths, certainly not when handled by one of its second-tier genre directors. Taylor Wong's The Truth is for completists and extreme fans of courtroom dramas only.
The pairing of Wong and Andy Lau looked promising on paper, but the dramatic backstory (Lau's an orphan who becomes a lawyer, reconnects with his birth mother and ends up defending her in court) is garish and Wong's execution is stale and lifeless, depriving the film of an emotional core.
At almost two hours the running time is excessive too. The court scenes are sluggish and uneventful, performances lack weight and the cinematography is comatose. It's a complete misfire, a surprisingly dim film from one of Hong Kong's more energetic and daring B-film directors. A big disappointment.