Infernal affairs. Literature & Language. Movie Review.

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Infernal Affairs
The worst stage of hell is continuous hell because it is when the hell dwellers suffer the most. When a movie begins with such an epigram, you expect the story to fit the saying. Infernal Affairs does just that. When one thinks of it, Young Lau Kin Ming and Young Chan Wing Yan's stories suffer continuous hell because they are both caught in versions of life that they cannot escape. While the two have to do whatever they can to survive, it is evident that they are suffering. Unlike the Hollywood adaptation, Infernal Affairs is short, and to the point, and this makes it easy for the viewer to follow.
The narration of the movie is, particularly on point. It begins with the movie's two protagonists still in their teenage years. Lau is a young recruit in Sam's drug trafficking operation. However, instead of becoming a gangster, Lau is to join the police force, work his way up the ranks while serving as a mole for Sam. Lau and Yan cross paths at the police academy. But Yan is expelled for breaking the rules, which is just a cover story. Yan has been recruited to work as a mole in Sam's employ.
Andrew Lau and Alan Mak do not waste time with unnecessary dialogue. Instead, they jump straight to ten years later when Yan and Lau have become deeply embedded in their operations. In the film's first dramatic arc, the narration is perfect as it arrives at a draw when neither Sam nor Wong can outsmart the other. But the narration now brings up what the viewer has just learned. Both Wong and Sam are now aware that there is a mole in each of their camps. Therefore, the race now is to flush out the mole or try o beat the other camp while the moles are still intact.
When Lau and Yan are assigned to find the mole in their camps, one cannot help but marvel at the ingenious construct. In addition to creating a fictitious mole, the two have to find out what they can within their bosses' camps. The filmmakers' clever construct may sound forced, but it does not appear that way on screen. The narration is done straightforwardly with minimum self-congratulation for the ingenu...