A Witness Out of the Blue

Master robber Wong (Louis Koo) pulls off a big jewelry heist, but the bag of loot disappears and his gang members start being picked off one by one. He's framed for murder during the heist and is determined to find the real killers and avenge his friends. Some months later, he's hiding out in an old people's home run by Joy (Jessica Hester Hsuan), a partially blind, partially greedy but also humane woman, while Detective Lam (Louis Cheung) is trying to track him down, while also wondering if perhaps his own superior officer, Senior Inspector Yip, might be somehow involved. And his only lead is the parrot found at a murder site, a parrot who could, perhaps, say who the killer really is....

This is a cat-and-mouse (or, cat-and-bird) story in which the viewer is never entirely certain who the bad guys are and who the good guys are; they seem quite interchangeable for a variety of reasons. There's a fair number of chases, exchanges of gunfire and the odd bombing or two, but it's actually not all that violent comparatively speaking, and the characters are suitably moody, dangerous, mysterious and, occasionally, almost slapstick. Also, periodically the characters speak English (mainly to say "sorry" or "yes, sir") while the subtitles tell us just that, which is a little weird but endearing. Entertaining, overall.