Crew
Directors/Producers – Johnnie To & Wai Ka Fai, Screenplay – Aun Kin Yee, Wai Ka Fai, Yau Nai Hoi & Yip Tin Shing, Photography – Cheng Siu Keung, Music – Cacine Wong, Visual Effects Supervisor – Stephen Ma, Production Design – Bruce Yu. Production Company – One Hundred Years of Film Company Limited/Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd Production.
Cast
Andy Lau (Big), Cecilia Cheung (Lee Fung Yee), Cheung Siu-fai (Inspector Chung), Hon Ping (Four Eyes), Yu Wenzhong (Master Wu)
Plot
Police inspector Lee Fung Yee conducts a raid on a strip joint. At the same time, her captain Chung enters a nearby building and tries to apprehend a murderous contortionist named Four Eyes. Four Eyes flees. So too does the stripper Big because he is an illegal immigrant from China. The two raids and suspects get mixed up and Big is arrested. Lee Fung Yee has Big released, finding that he is a former Buddhist monk. He can see people’s karma and knows that she is due to die because she was a Japanese soldier in a previous life. He returns and saves her, in so doing becoming caught up in the pursuit for Four Eyes, while she digs into his past and the reasons he quit being a monk following the death of his friend.
Director Wai Ka Fai is a unique voice in Hong Kong Cinema. Wai began directing with the Western Peace Hotel (1995) and then went onto the fascinating alternate timelines gangster film Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997). Most of Wai Ka Fai’s work has been made in collaboration with Johnnie To. The two have had a number of hits including the romantic comedy Love on a Diet (2001) and the gangster film Fulltime Killer (2001). The two have versatility in a variety of genres and have ventured into fantastic material on a number of occasions together including the likes of:- Help!!! (2000), a black comedy set in a hospital that has some fantasy elements; Wu Yen (2001), a comedy about mischievous fairies; My Left Eye Can See Ghosts (2002), a comedy about a woman who starts to see ghosts after an accident; and the amazing Mad Detective (2007), about a detective who sees people’s inner personalities;; as well as Wai Ka Fai’s solo efforts Fantasia (2004) about a wizard drawn through time to contemporary Hong Kong, and Himalaya Singh (2005), a Magical Realist comedy involving amnesia drugs; and the meta-fiction Written By (2009) where a dead man is reincarnated in an alternate life in his daughter’s novel.
Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai love creating films about people with unusual abilities – My Left Eye Can See Ghosts is a comedy about a woman who starts to see ghosts after an accident; in Mad Detective, a detective can see people’s inner personalities; and there is the self-explanatory Blind Detective (2013). In Running on Karma, Andy Lau gets the ability to see the karma accrued from people’s past lives and can deduce that it is in play as various things happen to them in this life. He is constantly opining how karmic destiny brought everything to the exact moment it is now, right down to the fowl he and Cecilia Cheung are being served as dinner in an open-air Chinese restaurant.
In Running on Karma, To and Wai immediately head for the completely crazed a mere couple of scenes in where the police investigation of a warehouse uncovers a man (Han Ping) who unfolds himself from inside a tin with a tiny aperture. The film even winds in fantasy martial arts moves with opponents pursuing each other across the ceiling and Andy Lau doing a press-up with his entire body balanced in mid-air on the tip of one finger. Andy Lau gives an interestingly strange performance. None the more so than when we see him in his prosthetic body suit, which turns him into almost a cartoon figure with bulging biceps and thighs along with a tiny waist (even if the bodysuit used to create the muscles looks somewhat fake whenever we see him bare-chested).
There are thoroughly deranged scenes like the one at the bus terminal that starts with police captain Cheung Siu-fai beating a bag until it starts to bleed and then the utterly bizarre image of him putting his head inside and then being grabbed and gyrating about with the bag over his head. And then of Andy Lau pursuing Four Eyes as he escapes up a ventilation shaft with Lau scuttling along the outside of the shaft as it goes up and along the ceiling, punching holes through it, and finally leaving it twisted and screwed around with Four Eyes trapped inside.
All of this seems to be set up as a demented film with Andy Lau as the quirky bodybuilder ex-monk who can see karmic past lives and his determination to save Cecilia Cheung from her fate. However, the last third of Running on Karma goes in a completely sideways direction and drops most of this, having Cecilia disappear on the mountain in search of his friend and then Andy going on a quest for her, which somehow involved meeting up with himself before reaching a not entirely clear ending.
Trailer here