An Eye for an Eye

Here’s a Hong Kong crime thriller that mistakes moping for drama and soup for symbolism.

The plot sounds promising enough. Fung is a Triad boss’s daughter dating Tat, a cop. His partner Chung pines for her silently. Dad gets arrested, Fung inherits the organization, relationships crumble. Standard stuff. But then enforcer Cheong smells opportunity, rapes Fung, videotapes it, and uses the footage for blackmail. Revenge should follow.

It doesn’t. Not really.

Instead, we get ninety minutes of melodrama so overwrought it borders on parody. When our heroine appears to take up with her rapist, do we get tension? No. We get a montage of her ex-boyfriend wandering aimlessly in the rain while his partner croons karaoke torch songs. I’m not making this up.

Then there’s the soup. A coworker keeps making soup for the lovelorn cop. The film treats this as emotional shorthand. Dropped soup means heartbreak. Slammed soup means anger. Passed soup means unrequited love. It’s intended as dramatic symbolism, but plays like a stale running gag.

The fatal flaw? Joey Wang’s Fung. She’s pretty, certainly. But the script gives her nothing except tears and running from rooms with her hand over her mouth. The film needs her to be magnetic, to make us understand why two men orbit her like moons. Instead, she’s a cipher, a plot device in her own story.

This matters most when the film ventures into exploitation territory with Cheong’s assault. The villain gets development, menace, a complete arc. Fung gets victimization. It plays cheap when it should devastate. You can’t shortchange your protagonist and expect the audience to feel her pain.

There’s one spectacular sequence: a restaurant massacre that spills into the streets. Machetes instead of guns, bodies everywhere, a fire hydrant spraying water that mingles with blood. It’s beautifully choreographed chaos. It’s also completely disconnected from our protagonists. There’s a better crime film happening somewhere in this movie. We’re watching the wrong one.

Even the title proves false advertising. “An Eye for an Eye” promises revenge. What we get is Fung hitting Cheong once with a baseball bat so hard he flies through a window into a pool. He’s dead. Roll credits.

After ninety minutes of stylized excess, this moment needed raw brutality—think the baseball bat scene in Casino. A visceral beating capable of jolting the audience out of their desensitization, not one-hit cartoon physics. When you can’t even deliver on your titular promise, you’ve failed as a movie.

Max Mok, playing Chung, emerges as the film’s sole asset. He brings genuine charisma. You wish the movie belonged to him. Or to Cheong—a straight Scarface-style rise and fall might have worked. But the filmmakers wanted something original. They forgot that formulas exist for a reason.

An Eye for an Eye proves that originality without execution is just another way to bore an audience.