Triangle (Ringo Lam, Loony To, Hark Tsui 2007) China, Hong Kong

The much awaited movie Triangle, has come to the Santa Barbara film festival for our viewing pleasure. Personally I have only seen one other Chinese made movie in my life time so I wasn’t sure what to expect due to the fact that it was a foreign film and was also a film with subtitles which usually isn’t my style. I loved this movie though. It was action packed, had an interesting plot, and was overall just a fun movie.

The movie is told in thirty minute segments with each of the directors handing his thirty minute piece off to the next director. The movie is a fast paced with many triangles developing in many different aspects of the film. One of the first triangles is about three drinking buddies who develop a plan to rob a jewelry store to score a big pay day and to fix their financial problems. The three buddies plan to rob the store seems to be panning out until a mysterious man meets them and tells them about a box under the Hong Kong Legislative building that has riches beyond their wildest dreams. Here yet another Triangle develops. The movie also has another triangle which is a love triangle that develops between several of the main characters in the movie. This triangle adds another element of chaos among the original triangle of buddies. With all the triangles between the characters, relationships are strained with the element of money thrown into their relationship.

Overall I highly enjoyed the movie. It was the first type of movie of this kind with three directors each working on a separate part of the film that I have seen. It was hard to tell when the director switch’s happen, but I did notice that the first director set up several plots for the other directors to work with, yet some of the plots never materialized into any thing other than a single scene in the film. The only drawback to the movie is that the last ten minutes kind of fizzled out and was somewhat of a disappointing ending. I actually enjoyed this movie so much that I am looking forward to see other movies the directors made. Unfortunately I saw the last showing of the movie during the film festival unless they add the movie to the schedule later in the week.


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