LGM Film Club, Part 357: Election

I love Johnny To, even if not all his movies are great. But his 2005 film, Election, absolutely is great. The plot is simple. A triad in Hong Kong has an election every two years to pick its new leader. The election is sacrosanct. When a loser doesn’t accept the results, all hell breaks loose. But it’s the details and the emotional heft that make this succeeds, as is required of any genre film, as well as a good script of course. The ending, when one person finally has his revenge over the other, is astoundingly good, as powerful as anything in Goodfellas or Casino or The Godfather. Here’s a really good essay at Mubi on the film.