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A heist film from three legendary Asian directors, Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To, who come together to tell the story of three desperate friends who turn to crime in order to overcome their financial issues.

Triangle is a film that was apparently the initial brainchild of Tsui Hark (Once Upon A Time In China, Time and Tide), who brought on board two of his old friends, Ringo Lam (City On Fire, Full Contact) and Johnnie To (Election, Running On Karma), who each directed a 30-35 minute segment of a single story.  The decision was made to use a single narrative throughout to give more of a cohesive feeling rather than using an anthology format, but the very distinctive styles of the director’s involved assures that the viewer knows when they’ve entered the next section.

Sam (Simon Yam), Fai (Louis Koo) and Mok (Sun Honglei) are three drinking buddies who are all looking for a big score to alleviate their financial woes.  Fai is a cabbie who aspires to joining up with a criminal gang, and has set up a jewelry store heist for them to participate in, but Sam gets cold feet about the robbery, preoccupied with his wife Ling (Kelly Lin) and her strange behavior.  Ling fears that she is pregnant, but considering her affair with cop Wen (Lam Ka-tung), who knows who is the actual father?  There’s also some allusions made to Sam having possibly murdered his first wife in a car accident, which would imply some very fancy driving, but let’s keep the ball rolling and not get bogged down in details.

The men are presented with a gold coin and a business card by a mysterious man at their favorite watering hole, which leads them to an alternate theft of a box hidden within the bowels of a government building, which contains a Tang Dynasty era robe, made entirely of the coins woven together.  They pull this off instead of the jewelry store robbery, but begin to have suspicions of one another’s motivations immediately.  Revelations are made by Sam as to his wife’s fidelity, and I was surprised to see him turn into a vicious revenge machine in the latter half of things, as the introductions painted him much more low-key.  Hark sets things up, Lam’s middle half is a little meandering for my tastes, but Johnnie To brings it home in fine fashion, trapping all those involved in a remote area at a restaurant that’s not prepared for the chaos these strangers bring with them.  Oh, and there’s also some more of that strangely broad humor taken at the expense of the mentally challenged that seems to be a staple of certain Hong Kong films when they encounter a mechanic with a visible tic and behavioral issues.  Ha-ha, ho-ho, it is to laugh, right?  It must be a cultural thing.

Triangle is an interesting watch, in that each section is very much visibly the work of the director involved, and while this can make things uneven, it’s an interesting experiment.

Triangle features two short featurettes, Making of Triangle and the self explanatory Behind The Scenes as its only bonus material.

Triangle was a strange watch for me, as Hark’s set-up doesn’t really make some of the motivations all that easy to follow, then Lam’s section moves things into a warehouse for numerous revelations that slow things down a bit, and finally To brings it into darkly comic territory with his conclusion.  By the time the credits rolled I was left feeling like I would need to watch this again to pick up on more details that I might’ve missed on my initial viewing.  The film’s 3 director components are pretty apparent based on the visual styling of things, which makes it an interesting watch even if there are plotting elements that I may want to have another look at to make sure I’m getting everything out of the film that I should.

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