Three

Best of all: you don't have to wait until a concluding set piece for To to prove his prowess as a storyteller.

When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.

Even during the gunfight, this always remains a character piece: a thoughtful, imaginative movie about stubbornly authoritarian professionals, protecting their territories.

After an hour of slow burn simmer, Three culminates in a six-minute set piece that’s among the most memorable action scenes of the year.

Just like To’s characters all have a little something to learn from each other, Three is a master class in how movies can be as unique and infinite as the people who make them.

The veteran Hong Kong director makes his audience wait for the promised fireworks, and Three’s flimsy premise never quite captures the grounded realism of Drug War or Election, or the visual flourish of Exiled or Vengeance.

70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.