Hong Kong, 1973: the police and the underworld are running the city as a joint business, and the money is flowing upward. Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong, directed by Woody Hui Ngai-Ming and Wong Jing, turns that moment into a 2021 action thriller about the birth of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
What is Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong about?
The city at the start of the seventies is prosperous on the surface and rotten underneath. Senior officers inside the colonial police have built an arrangement with the triads in which gambling, vice and drug money are shared out through an organised chain of bribes, and ordinary citizens pay the price. A corrupt Chinese chief inspector, Tsui Lok, and a gang boss known as Ho sit near the top of that arrangement. When the Governor decides the rot can no longer be ignored, he sets up a new body answerable to no one inside the force: the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Its investigators must build a case against men who have spent years hiding evidence, intimidating witnesses and buying silence. The film follows the collision between these new officials and the old network, from smoke-filled back rooms to street chases, as both sides realise that only one of them can survive the reckoning.
About the cast
Louis Koo and Tony Leung anchor a cast of Hong Kong screen veterans, joined by Francis Ng Chun-Yu, Gordon Lam Ka-Tung, Philip Keung Ho-Man, Michelle Hu, Kent Cheng Jak-Si and Yu Kang. Regular viewers of Hong Kong crime cinema will recognise the ensemble at once: faces who have spent decades playing cops, bosses and the men caught between them.
Context & significance
The founding of the ICAC in the early seventies is one of the defining chapters in modern Hong Kong history, and the territory's filmmakers have revisited it repeatedly. This version wears its genre labels openly: it is catalogued as action, crime, historical and thriller all at once, and runs a brisk hundred and five minutes. Wong Jing, one of the most prolific figures in Hong Kong commercial cinema, shares directing credit with Woody Hui Ngai-Ming, and the result favours pace, period costume and confrontation over slow procedural detail. The British colonial administration is the backdrop against which both the corruption and the clean-up unfold.
Watching Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong on Ktime
Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong is available on K-Time with a Persian dub, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the story without reading along. Reading this page costs nothing; watching the film simply requires logging in with a K-Time account. The whole service runs in Farsi, from menus to search, which keeps it comfortable for the Iranian diaspora audience it was built for.