B


At the end of the day, the Infernal Affairs series will stand something like the Hong Kong-Godfather series, only on a much smaller scale, of course. Its a very complex trilogy about cops, triads, corruption, betrayal, loyalty and what makes a person good. However, while I still enjoyed Infernal Affairs II a lot and thought it was a very nice addition to the first film, I can't say the latter of the third installment in this trilogy. This Infernal Affairs flick is still a good movie, but it feels very unnecessary, as all the important parts of the story have been told in the first two movies already and the third film really diminishes the impact of the first film's ending.

Working as a direct sequel to the first Infernal Afairs, but also having flashbacks to the time prior the first Infernal Affairs, it brings the whole cast of the first film back together (despite almost all of them being dead by the end of the first IA film). That actually seemed to be one of the very few purposes of these flashbacks - to bring the cast back together. Now the cast is once again great here. The old one, as well as the new additions. The plotline is immensly compex, though. I thought initially that Infernal Affairs II had a complex storyline, but it's nothing compared to the third film. After having finished the film I actually had to read up on a lot of stuff at IMDB about what in fact happened here. This movies basically ties together all loose knots in the first and the second film, but also creates some unnecessary knots itself.

At the end, it mostly makes good sense and completes the Infernal Affairs trilogy on an interesting note, but in retrospect it just doesn't seem needed or even wanted. In particular, Andy Lau's character Mind suffers from the third movie. I thought he had perfect closure at the end of the first film, but the third movie pretty much ruined that (even though that probably was a consequent continuation of his character). I really liked the new characters of Yeung and Shen and the twists connected to them. The scenes with Tony Leung seemed rather superfluous this time around. Eric Tsang sadly wasn't given much to di either in his short running time.

Overall, this movie does not hurt the series, but is an interesting, yet confusing and unnecessary addition to the otherwise very good franchise.