Detective vs. Sleuths follows Sean Lau's Jun Lee, a former police inspector haunted by a series of cases in which - he feels - the wrong people took the fall. Jun, resplendent in a patched-up yellow raincoat, frequently beats Hong Kong's finest to the punch when investigating murders, able to tune into the heckling spirits of the soon-to-be-departed (that are screaming inside his head) to make enormous deductive leaps; second-guessing the criminal gang who are terrorising the island. Directed by Wai Ka-fai, Johnnie To's co-director on Fulltime Killer and Mad Detective, Detective vs Sleuths works best when Jun is heedlessly racing ahead of his bewildered accomplices. A cramped shoot-out in an apartment complex is given another absurd level of danger thanks to Jun's delusional belief that he is both carrying a pistol and a crack shot with it.
In reality, Jun has raced ahead of his former colleagues with nothing more than a finger gun, wildly cocking his thumb at pistol-packing youths while Charlene Choi Tsoek-jin's heavily pregnant lieutenant inspector chases after him. Entertaining when trapped in Jun's company - the disgraced detective a kind of homeless, paranormally gifted Columbo - Wai's film starts to stumble the further we have to stray from his perspective. The level of churning exposition required to make sense of the denouement sadly means that Jun is often side-lined for the ravings of sleeper cell psychopaths. The decision to resolve all interpersonal threads through endless gunfire doesn't help either. That key characters must be slowly rationed into the film's final moments means that their passage to these events is lousy with ineffectual computer-assisted shoot-outs. Teams of well-trained experts line up across from each other to mindlessly blast away, the scenery alive with puny CG squibs that make no physical impact on anything or anyone. It's as if the case has been temporarily turned over to Leslie Nielsen's Police Squad!.
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