Cops and Robbers

Cops and Robbers is essentially the story of three cops and one robber, the former an amalgam of professionals with different temperaments, the latter a psycho killer obsessed with guns. The title comes from a children's game, in which players are assigned roles of either law enforcers or lawbreakers largely by chance, colouring the film with a shade of fatalistic irony. Director Alex Cheung, a wunderkind who had been winning film awards since his teens, tackles his feature debut with abandon, indulging in filmic and storytelling devices like a kid in a candy store, staging kinetic scenes in ordinary neighbourhoods, planting psychological clues in everyday situations and lobbing grenades of sensational emotions into the narrative mix.