The Sleuth Wars” just came out of the circle, and looking back at 2022, the theaters were disastrous and arguably full of destruction. The appearance of “The Sleuth Wars” was like a strong shot in the arm, bringing an uptick to the otherwise unhelpful box office market, and then declining down again. A movie carrying too many things becomes a landmark and loses the fun of the movie itself.This is actually a very simple story: a detective, a madman, left the police force for many years, split many personalities to investigate the case, encountered the fake title of lynch mob, to avenge the wrongdoing, and finally to the light. This is the formula of the movie commercial action film, but the screenwriter’s idea is very clever: he put the chase between the detective organization and the detective on the back burner, and focus on portraying the different choices between the male protagonist Li Jun and the detective organization to face the unjust case. The young audience sits in the theater, eating popcorn and looking at their phones at the same time. What people want is no longer a movie, but a hyperlink. Life needs to be saved, and the next time the colorful bell rings, you never know, what kind of a, digital calling it will be.
Here, we will not discuss why the image of the police has changed, but rather what exactly exists at both ends of the justice spectrum. The technical terminology says that there is a big difference between formal justice and substantive justice. Formal justice refers to legal justice or institutional justice, i.e., the rule of law, which is the legal justice determined by and reflecting social justice; while the corresponding substantive justice is social justice, i.e., the justice of the basic structure of society. It is the general justice that discards the specific content and special circumstances, i.e., the “equal treatment of everyone”, which is the abstract justice; while the corresponding substantive justice refers to the actual, specific content of justice that exists in specific people, events or behaviors, which is the specific justice or special justice. Put into the movie, the private execution of the detective organization, in their view, may be considered a kind of social justice; and their antagonist Li Jun actually guards precisely the same kind of social justice: the police is only a detective, not a god. God is above society, and the abuse of social justice also shows the problem of the judicial system.
On the other hand, the writers do not discuss whether society needs extrajudicial enforcers or not; in fact, the existence of extrajudicial enforcers has been announced since the first case of the detective organization. Foreshadowed killings are not uncommon in film and television: types such as Darker’s notice sheet in The Dark One, organ warnings in Psycho, to case numbers throughout the movie, and so on. Killing is not uncommon either, how many movies have murders, deaths, family failures and marital breakdowns. Why is it that only Lee Joon in “The Greatest Detective” is the most insane: he fails, loses his job, his wife commits suicide, his daughter commits a crime, and himself becomes a “madman” in the eyes of the world. Almost in Li Jun’s view, a false case of injustice is a serious matter, killing, is to kill a world. Only in Li Jun, killing is a matter that needs to be saved, and this saving, not about his daughter, and not about himself. Fang Lixin’s murderous eyes to stimulate Li Jun, with thirty female corpses, to torture Chen Yi’s soul, and Li Jun, with all the monsters that appear in the case, to seek forgiveness for their actions.
In fact, each of us has a monster inside, and when this monster takes control of our destiny, we become anxious, tired, running away, and even like Li Jun, become crazy. We live in our own hell, and our lives are so mismatched, our internal conflict, is so rapid, where our lives are, is the bottom of Li Jun’s overpass, it is ourselves, trapping ourselves. Li Jun spent half of his life, the life we do not want to face and re-presented. So what if you’re crazy, like Fang Lixin, pretending to be a gentleman, is the most basic norm in the world of people. For many years, we are not exactly this cold and scattered, looking at the lives of others and their own. Just as in the past 17 years, Li Jun examined the soul of the murderer Lou Jue, the fat boy and the pig woman who cooked the corpse, the 30 female corpses, the 13-year-old Fang Lixin’s murder, his wife’s suicide and his daughter’s imprisonment, in fact, how is it not examining his own soul everywhere? Just like Fang Lixin, calm is so chilling, even killing his own son does not know if it will hurt. Lin Feng’s eyes, there is not a trace of expression, nor a trace of concern. Great evil if righteous, great evil if good, in this moment, the line between good and evil is blurred, the distance between us and hell, another step closer.
I think of director Yang Dechang, there is a line, Yang Yang asked his father, why everyone can not see their own back, as the film’s final, Li Jun painful question: is a person can become a monster, why can not I? Monster, is the back of the person, that is not always half of the truth do not know it. Just like Fang Lixin, he is the magic police, a butcher, a detective, Chen Yi’s husband, or baby’s father. A monster bridges the gap between Wei Changhui’s moral anxiety and what Li Jun can call his life’s faith in solving crimes. On this side of the monster, is the man, and on the other side, is the abyss.
After watching the film, I kept thinking, Fang Lixin tortured and killed thirty female corpses, why should he frame Li Jun, because Li Jun is a detective, or because his daughter has been working under Fang Lixin? Why, then, did he end up marrying Chen Yi? Is it love, or appreciation of his own work? Just like Xue Tian in “The Dark One”, he could not allow anyone to tarnish the purity of the blind girl Zheng Jia, is this purity in Xue Tian’s eyes, or is it Zheng Jia’s own purity? It seems, for Fang Lixin and Xue Tian, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. We walk through other people’s lives, burrowing in and out of other people’s lives, and there is an inner anxiety, darkness and helplessness that leads us in all sorts of directions. But whether it is Xue Tian, Fang Lixin, or Li Jun, they are all just a projection and reflex of myself, and life is still being borne by myself: like a mirror image projection, a representation of the dark side of evil, it is Fang Lixin, not Li Jun himself. If man still puts hope in man, man is so circular, watching the world grow before us, or us wither before the world.
Then I hope that you are full inside, and must be very assertive in what you do, and firm in your words and actions, so that you do not have to deal with the ghosts that reside inside, and have firmness, so that there is direction, and pretend, so that there is redemption and forgiveness.
