Film Name: 报应 / Punished / Bou ying / 報應
I kept putting off watching “Punished” for fear of encountering a censored version.
Law Wing-cheung still has vision. “Punished” is a rare Galaxy production that anchors its narrative power in family ethics. Moreover, defying the typical restraint—even stinginess—in expressing the protagonist’s emotions found in Galaxy films (romance films excluded), the lead actor Anthony Wong’s performance in “Punished” is almost entirely driven by emotional scenes. —As the standard-bearer, Johnnie To faces a situation akin to “drawing his sword and looking around in bewilderment” (“Exiled,” “Vengeance”) within the distinctive cinematic universe he built through years of accumulated strength. How his team of talented directors (including those influenced by him) can forge new paths within his mature cinematic language paradigm has increasingly become an unavoidable question. In this regard, the fresh shifts evident in “Punished” should not be dismissed as accidental.
It’s just unfortunate that Law Wing-cheong couldn’t hold it together.
“Punished” features several scenes above average quality. For instance, the night sequences, the stalking scenes, and the ransom handover involving Anthony Wong are all handled with confidence. Particularly noteworthy is the climactic showdown between Jaycee Chan and kidnapper Lam Lee in the old warehouse. Drawing on the mature cinematographic style pioneered by Johnnie To, the back-and-forth action, blending movement and stillness, achieves a remarkably compelling effect. Yet when the focus shifts to domestic scenes—particularly the substantial narrative arc defining the film’s character, exploring Anthony Wong’s relationships with his two children and his second wife, Zhang Keyi—the cinematography immediately descends into an inexplicably flustered, unfocused awkwardness. This elementary-school-level confusion—like a child unsure how to approach their subject—coexists within the same film alongside the earlier graceful, confident, and effortlessly weighty action sequences. It creates a jarringly uncomfortable experience.
One naturally wonders if this stems from Law Wing-cheung’s lack of mastery.
Having trained under a director renowned for his strong visual style, Law seems to lack the necessary initiative in pursuing formalistic expression. The dynamic sequences—streetlights and alleyways in nightscapes, stark black-and-white shadows, spatial compositions—bear Du Qiwei’s unmistakable signature. His attempt to explore new subjects—family dynamics and the dramatic tension born from kinship and social norms—holds promise. Yet within Du’s cinematic vocabulary, no comparable framework exists for such material. Wong also fails to propose any viable solutions. One of Johnnie To’s greatest cinematic strengths lies in distilling common yet distinctive imagery from urban landscapes—both indoor and outdoor—amplifying them into symbolic carriers of meaning and emotion (think the vividly rendered streets and cafes in his films, the minibus in Running Out of Time, the crumpled paper in The Mission, etc.). Yet in Punished’s family scenes, no such traces are visible. Everything is hastily glossed over amid a lack of direction. While Punished may be script-wise sound, this doesn’t alter the finished product’s half-baked predicament, thus failing to achieve the conceptual strengths it aspired to.
(A brief digression here. We’ve been so deeply conditioned by the mindset of “central themes” and “paragraph summaries” since childhood that when watching a film (or reading a novel, etc.), we often hear people praise its profound themes and how remarkable the work is because of them. I’ve always found this causal relationship hard to accept. Climbing Mount Everest step by step from the base is entirely different from jumping out of a helicopter. The difficulty of art—and simultaneously its beauty—lies in using human strength alone to reach realms beyond ordinary reach. In this respect, art is no different from competitive sports. To illustrate: if you can touch 3.5 meters off the ground without assistance, you might qualify for the NBA. But if you use a ladder and claim you can just stretch and touch the top of the backboard, no one will take you seriously. —In artistic works, theme is always intertwined with form, ultimately expressed naturally through that form. Film is no exception. And the form of film has never been text. Treating film as mere visualization of a script lacks respect for cinema’s intrinsic nature—a key reason why stylized directors with unique cinematic insights remain rare in mainland China.
But upon reflection—rather than attributing this solely to Luo Yongchang’s shortcomings, it’s more accurate to say that this particular cinematic language of Old Du (Yinghe) carries inherent limitations.
Much like Jackie Chan’s relationship to Bruce Lee, Johnnie To’s cinematic language evolved as a reaction against the flamboyant intensity of Hong Kong cinema’s golden era in the 1980s. Unlike John Woo’s exaggerated, stylized approach, To’s aesthetic embodies the principle of “using motion to compensate for stillness, and stillness to control motion.” “Compensating stillness with motion” manifests as dramatic scenes shot with action cinematography; while “controlling motion with stillness” reveals itself in the tendency toward restrained framing during the most intense (even brutal) action sequences. Often, the frame erupts with frenzied violence— yet the frame remains frozen in a single, powerful shot. This deliberate contrast between stillness and motion creates a tension between the camera’s movement and the narrative’s content, a force that often unfolds with an elegant, cool, almost playful rhythm. The fusion of motion, stillness, and playfulness forges the distinctive formal sensibility of Johnnie To’s cinema.
Yet no matter how rebellious, Johnnie’s films remain detached from realism; no matter how cool the tone, their foundation remains romantic. This is Hong Kong cinema. As for Johnnie’s (Galaxy) films, they depict a world further poeticized. What is poetry? Two people (or several), with no connection whatsoever, can venture into the world together for some inexplicable reason; they can love each other to death, hate each other to death—this is poetry. If there’s a connection, it’s not poetry. Friends bound by life and death are poetry; love born of chance encounters is poetry; even faint hope or icy despair in cruel circumstances are poetry. But husband and wife are not poetry; father and son or daughter are not poetry. What ordinary people cannot believe or achieve is poetry; the mundane, the bonds that sustain people in reality, are not poetry. For whether captured on film or not, the greatest enemy implicit in Lao Du’s work has always been this real world. Thus, the more ethereal, rare, and fragile the subject, the more it can be torn apart by Lao Du’s unique method, revealing a tension that moves us deeply. But those things already embedded in reality, muddled together with what he seeks to resist—things he can’t even begin to tear apart—well, sorry, they’re incompatible.
Punished made me see this incompatibility clearly.
At first, I thought Punished was simply a film Wong Kar-wai didn’t execute well. But then I wondered: if Old Du himself had directed it, how would he have handled those mundane family ethics and messy domestic conflicts?
I can’t imagine it.
“Punished” feels more like a failed experiment for Galaxy. Attempting to shoot something new with established formulas only exposed their own shortcomings.
But isn’t that better than repeating themselves?
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