Speaking of characters, WKW comes something of a cropper with Jacky’s. Though Jacky Cheung is usually a very capable actor (as proved by his later, carefully judged performances in Ashes Of Time and Days Of Being Wild), he fails in Tears to evoke sufficient engagement from the audience, simply because his wide-eyed, semi-psychotic portrayal is practically flat. Of course, not every character has to be drawn from the WKW stable of introspective silent souls, and this could have been an opportunity to create a viable gangster with carefully shaded desires and motives. Alas, that wasn’t to be. Some may argue that Jacky’s character is refreshingly simple and that real life people aren’t like WKW characters - but perhaps that’s a good thing if the alternative was to have something like Jacky’s character in every WKW film. In any case, WKW’s late attempt to show an underlying angst behind Jacky’s problems - hints at his denial of his mother’s remarriage - seem like a lame attempt to give his character more depth. The only pathos we feel is when, just before the end, he manages to dupe Andy into believing that he will stay out of trouble, but even on his final scene of suicidal determination we still don’t really care about him. Watching Jacky’s character, compared to an infinitely more shaded performance from Andy, I felt like shouting at the screen the words of Jim Kelly from Enter The Dragon: ‘man, you straight out of a comic book!’ And considering that Andy is merely average, compared to many of WKW’s later characters, this gives a good idea as to what a mistake Jacky’s character was.
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