Opulence and maximalism, hedonistic excess, overcranked debauchery, and an escalating series of fraudulent financial practices exploiting the stock market and leveraging globalist corporatism. A pot of simmering liquid gold waiting to boil over, hungry obsession twisted across opposite sides of the law over decades of warring factions, the intersection of capital and justice in a shimmering skyscraper. Conceptually a stylistic and towering return to form for Hong Kong cinema, reuniting two of its biggest stars to face off in a crime epic calling back to the kind of glitzy, stylistically feverish dramas that used to release so fast it would have been impossible to keep up. Today, Hong Kong cinema is far more tempered and quiet, its once notable directors retired, making mainland propaganda, or failing to revive the magnetic energy that the country once brought to global cinema. If anyone could infuse this dry landscape with the energetic fervor that once called to the world stage, why not Felix Chong Man-keung – who wrote the smash hit Infernal Affairs (2002), eventually adapted into Scorsese’s The Departed (2006).
Reuniting film legends Tony Leung Chiu-wai (now hot off a Marvel debut that introduced one of the world’s finest actors to a whole new generation) and Andy Lau (one of Hong Kong’s most prolific and brilliant performers), who first met on the set of Infernal Affairs, everything here seems precision engineered to be a rousing success — or, at the very least, pleasantly enjoyable enough to have some faith in the future of Hong Kong’s cinema outside of the brilliant Soi Cheang and the distant dream of his mentor Johnnie To’s elusive Election 3. Leung’s Ching — a smooth talking business magnate whose company’s explosive success garners the attention of 1970s Hong Kong’s newly formed Independent Commission Against Corruption — comes across like Felix Chong’s response to Scorsese’s suave degenerate Jordan Belfort, a white collar criminal lying and manipulating his way to the top. Andy Lau’s Lau is a measured but increasingly desperate foil, confidently aware of Ching’s blatant fraud but always a step behind pinning him down.
Consumed by plotting some labyrinthine cobweb of interspersed narrative ideas, the upbeat meteoric rise to success that the film hinges on is mostly flat and uninspiring, not able to commit enough to the true depraved depths that may be necessary to sell these ideas. For the most part, it’s little more than Ching and his associate Tsang (Simon Yam, another HK all-star making a welcome appearance) just being wealthy, charming criminals openly manipulating the market and swindling companies to engage in their fraudulent activities in lavish high-rises, delivered with the smarmy financial haughtiness of an Adam McKay film. Though the leads the film orbits around may be at the top of their game, nothing can sell it, and what should be a mad spiral of chaos and untethered capitalistic excess feels like the tamest possible version of all its ideas.
Coupled with a mostly inert B-plot, where you’re forced to sit through the ICAC putting together the pieces to discover what you already know, it mostly becomes a droning experience where nothing sticks because it never quite seems to matter. It follows the course of contemporaries of its genre so cautiously that it becomes deterministic – the stakes unimportant after the fourth, fifth, or sixth time Ching slips out of the jaws of justice. Occasionally, it musters brilliance, moments where it finds ways to heighten the intensity and energize the film’s direction, but these opportunities are quickly stifled by its insistence on never shaking up the wider beats it must hit. There’s little to no interest in actually granting any of its characters agency, these narrowly defined beings that stick strictly to their path, unwavering, not allowing any of the necessary contradictions or reflection that often infuse these suave criminal against determined detective narratives with a gripping animal magnetism.
On the comedown, it feels like it could end anywhere. An endless epilogue not defining any concrete narrative impact. Ambling and aimless and just going through the motions because it’s all it knows, clever if it’s intentionally reflecting the emotional downfall of its characters but a slog in reality despite even the most generous of concessions. Gestures broadly at the crushing weight of capitalism and the collateral damage caused by this kind of one percenter market fraud, but isn’t nearly as brutally nihilistic as Life Without Principle (2011) or as effusively naïve as Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (2011). The Goldfinger exists in its own world to such a destructively insular degree that it’s hard to even envision the global scale it’s playing on. The result just feels like a bubbly and glitzy celebration of endless wealth capped off by a few pre-credit titles explaining how many people were affected by Ching’s actions. It may not quite implicitly endorse the delirious insider trading and market manipulation or lavish lifestyle, but it certainly doesn’t get to actually deconstructing or subverting its glossy surface, and the consequences at play are weightless.
The Goldfinger wants so desperately to be a charming, light romp that slickly delivers a star-studded cast firing snappy dialogue down a twisted rabbit hole of sickening capital. It is not successfully that, but most disappointingly it just plainly isn’t enjoyable; a meandering, toothless, paper thin film propped up by its cast. The pointed nostalgia play ultimately works against it – longing for what now feels like the long gone golden age of the early ‘00s through the mid ‘10s where this kind of narrative structure became an endlessly subverted, mercurial subgenre where the simplicity on the surface gave way to something fascinating and interrogatory. For now, back to waiting for Election 3.