In the pursuit of material wealth, few can lose their focus on the purpose of wealth and be more ruthless than the Chinese living in an urban society where money means more in society to be a motivation and a cause for questionable ethics. Is Life Without Principle an eerie reminder of how one loses their principles of life in the senseless pursuit of material wealth or just an emotional ride with a character-driven story on the premise of daily financial crisis?
Those who are expecting either may be a little taken aback that Life Without Principle feels more like a social commentary on how money makes the world go round in Hong Kong. Set during the recent debt crisis in Greece, the story is told in a non-linear fashion; by beginning with the murder of a cash-loaded loan shark as the crossroad where the storylines of three main characters meet, then moving on to introduce the financial troubles faced by these characters.
First, we are introduced to Richie Ren who plays a police detective with a penchant of not making hasty (both financial and personal) decisions to get into long-term financial commitments, despite the urges of his wife, Connie (Myolie Wu). While he investigates the murder at the beginning, we slowly meet Theresa (Denise Ho), a struggling bank clerk who is unsuccessfully convincing her clients to invest in high-risk stocks that her financial institution is trying to push and on the verge of losing her job. Lastly is Brother Panther (Lau Ching Wan), a loyal and subservient triad footsoldier with admirable gang virtues, but lands into dangerous money-making schemes in order to make a quick buck to bail his arrested leader.
With the exception of Brother Panther, Ho, Ren and Myolie were merely playing as everyday people, which helps audiences to relate with their financial turbulence from their everyday lives that is suffice since their storyline seem to run tangent with Brother Panther’s thread. A major portion of the screentime was centered on Lau, who was given space to have some acting quirks and, probably out of the fondness of To for gangster stories, had more time to develop Panther’s storyline before reaching the central point that one can get into financial trouble even in the scheming underworld.
Although we are shown each characters’ problems that money can solve, Life Without Principle does not seem to be trying to show how money (or the lackthereof) can drive people to forgo their moral principles, but how people can be screwed over without any strong financial principal. As the stock market crashes and the subtle hints from To, through some of the minor characters, to remind audiences to only trust in cash, it delivers a different message than money is not the root of all evil, but greed is inherent in every human being.
Greed, how ever they are justified as desperation, is the prime motivator for the characters, both major and minor roles, to commit murder, to go as low as to take the ‘missing’ money of a dead man and to value the buying a home before property prices soar more than the lives of a loved one.
Greed helps them to find the easy way out from their troubles and makes both them and the other characters that they meet to be indifferent to each others’ misfortunes or fortunes as long as they stand in the way of their own gains. One particular scene that shows this is when Brother Panther is hoping for the stock market to rise again, while his dying comrade is hoping that it would fall further to win his bet against the market.
Despite the abrupt and happy resolution for all three main storylines that pulls the punch on the consequences of greed, it feels that the movie wanted to show that greed is a cycle of losses and gains, and one does not learn their lesson to practice abstinence, especially in a complicated and materialistic urban society that lives on the hub of international financial transactions that are affected by external forces.
It would be nice to recommend Life Without Principle on the basis of its message, but despite solid performances from the cast, it still lacks a certain theatrical punch and a non-fully developed script to make a worthwhile trip to the cinema for it. I can only recommend this to those who are curious of the works of Johnnie To, (whose I’m not overly familiar with) but from the reviews of those that claim to be, this one seems to be another dud from the supposed Hong Kong auteur.
The above movie review is from filmbah.blogspot.com
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