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Caught in Time is a possible portent of the direction that Hong Kong cinema will take in the coming years. Though, this means the preservation and continuation of cinema in the sense of it being an industry, it is a very sad prospect in the cultural sense. Since its establishment, Emperor Film Production has had its sights set on the Chinese market, while at the same time looking for new talent in the domestic market. This is how it once managed to engage Dante Lam and take him through locally oriented movies to films made solely for the Chinese audience. Now screenwriter Lau Ho-Leung is being dragged along the same career trajectory, but at a greatly accelerated pace. After financing his directorial debut, the magnificent Hong Kong farce Two Thumbs Up, which is based exclusively on domestic motifs, Lau’s second feature film was conceived purely for the Chinese market. Caught in Time exhibits all of the shortcomings of contemporary Chinese genre movies, from fake-looking CGI effects to pomposity, literalness and, of course, the mandatory conformity to the regime and the blatant propaganda function. At first glance, this duel between cops and a gang of thieves, which is based on actual events that occurred in the first half of the 1990s, comes across as a ridiculously literal paraphrase of Heat, but instead of two fascinating characters, it uses generic characters serving to glorify Chinese cops and seemingly unwittingly legitimises the permanent surveillance of the public space and the proliferation of security cameras in Chinese cities. On closer inspection, however, we find several thought-provoking motifs that, in the spirit of Lau’s previous films, especially the excellent short Killer & Undercover, show that there is perhaps a slightly self-reflective core lying below the surface of the superficially ostentatious formalistic exhibition. If we accept the formulaic characters as the intention, we can see the screenplay as a conceptually constructed conflict between a Chinese detective from a propaganda flick and a thug from a Hong Kong action movie. If we further develop this thought, Caught in Time is a genre commentary on the overlapping influences between Hong Kong and China at the level of crime and its depiction in films. Lau seems to reflect the motif of thugs coming from China to Hong Kong to carry out armed robberies, which was established by the milestone Long Arm of the Law. Johnny Mak’s iconic film treated this theme as a complex social-critical drama wrapped in an action thriller and reflected the plight of Chinese immigrants in the then British colony and the illusion of freedom and high living associated with it. Based in reality, this motif subsequently became a classic formula of Hong Kong cinema that still persists in the new millennium. Caught in Time creates its inverted power dynamic by stylising its villain based on Hong Kong movie thugs and the glorified antiheroes of the heroic bloodshed subgenre. These are directly referenced in the scene from the “video cinema”, in which a goon watches John Woo’s classic The Killer. (11/10/2021) (moins) (plus)