Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Three Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 2, 2017

Years ago when my wife and I were still dating she was going through my stacks of VHS tapes (which might give an indication of how long ago this was) and found the 1937 Alexander Korda epic Elephant Boy (available on DVD as part of Criterion’s Eclipse Series 30: Sabu!). “What’s this?” she asked innocently, to which I, ever in search of an easy punch line, responded, “It’s the prequel to The Elephant Man.” I’m maybe just a little chagrined to admit she believed me, this despite the fact that the VHS cover clearly had Sabu riding an elephant on it. In the same vein, I guess some wag might joke that Three was an early draft of 8½ (or its musical version Nine), but this numerically titled film is in fact a rather odd portrait of, yes, three characters bound together in the unlikely setting of a hospital emergency room. (Ironically, though, director Johnny To’s last film before this one was a musical, the 3D extravaganza Office, which beat critical darling La La Land to the “reinventing the musical for the modern age” sweepstakes by quite some time.) Three posits a no nonsense neurological surgeon named Tong Qian (Vicki Zhao) who gets into a bit of a turf war on her home territory when a notorious criminal named Shun (Wallace Chung) is brought in with a serious head wound after a police interrogation goes horribly wrong. Keeping track of Shun is policeman Ken (Louis Koo), who is pretty sure Shun is up to no good despite his injury and who butts heads with both the bad guy and the good doctor in his attempts to keep everything under control.

Some perhaps needlessly graphic surgery footage documents that Tong is a more than competent brain surgeon, though as she makes her rounds of patients with her acolytes, she’s upbraided by one man who is violently upset that Tong’s attempt at removing a spinal tumor has left him paralyzed. Tong is both distraught but also strangely steely in responding to the obviously deeply distraught patient, telling him that she did the best under unwinnable circumstances, and that he was still in the early days of his recovery process and might in fact regain his ability to move.

Meanwhile, Shun is brought in on a stretcher, himself also supposedly paralyzed from a bullet which has entered his skull and lodged in the frontal lobes of his brain, somewhat miraculously missing any “important” areas that would have seriously debilitated him. He’s wheeled into surgery almost by rote, but To cheats a little, showing him able to wiggle a toe here, a finger there, brief foreshadowings that the proposed surgery is not going to proceed as planned. As expected, Shun, in almost horror film coda style where the bad guy springs back to life after supposedly being done away with, springs up from the operating table and wreaks havoc, leading Ken to have to intrude into the quarantined space with his gun drawn. Shun rather unexpectedly invokes some kind of “human rights” nonsense and refuses the surgery, despite Tong’s assertions that he only has a few hours to get the bullet out of his head before really bad things start to happen.

That sets up what amounts to a patently bizarre cat and mouse game that takes up the bulk of the rest of the film, where Shun, handcuffed to a bed, still seems to be planning some kind of escape, while Ken is dealing with the aftermath of events that (mistakenly) led to Shun’s shooting. “We break the law in order to enforce the law,” Ken tells his lieutenant, in just one example of the moral shades of gray that are on display throughout the film. It becomes apparent that while Ken is kind of biding his time to see what exactly Shun has up his hospital gown sleeve he’s also perhaps greasing the wheels to implicate Shun in the mishap in a way that actually didn’t happen. Meanwhile, Tong is brooking no discontent in how she wants her emergency room run, this despite the fact that the place has at least two patients who aren’t keeping quiet about things, namely Shun and the guy who blames Tong for paralyzing him.

While it’s obvious that To is arranging the various moving parts for a huge set piece showdown within the confines of the cloistered emergency room (a set piece which in fact turns out to be a doozy), Three manages to work up significant tension in the runup to the event, simply courtesy of the dynamic interrelationships between the three main characters. This film is in a way another example of the same sort of challenges that Alfred Hitchcock faced when mounting Lifeboat. To has a bit more “breathing room” than Hitchcock did, and he uses it to his advantage, with a peripatetic camera that never seems to stop moving, and a kind of whirlwind ambience that helps the film overcome some protracted talky bits.

Three Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Three is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Shot with Arri Alexa XT Plus cameras and finished at a 2K DI (according to the IMDb), Three has a nicely sharp and well detailed image, something that's helped by the fact that most of the proceedings take place under the harsh (but bright) lighting of the hospital environment. While a few scenes have just slightly less fulsome shadow detail, by and large this is a presentation that offers excellent and consistent levels of fine detail (to the point that some of the surgery scenes may be a little stomach churning for some). Some scenes are either lit or graded toward blue tones, but generally speaking the palette looks natural and untoyed with. Aside from some almost imperceptible banding that occurs momentarily in some abrupt segues, there are no issues distracting from an excellent video presentation.

Three Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Three features a really effective DTS:X track (DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 core) in the original Cantonese. While the bulk of the really impressive activity comes late in the film during the big shootout, there is consistent spatial presence for all the "high tech" noises of the emergency room, as well as impressive directionality when, for example, a patient calls out from across the room and the camera is focusing on a character at the forefront of the frame. Good panning effects attend some of the rapid fire scenes where patients are wheeled in and out of this or that location, and of course once the gunfire starts erupting, there's some significant use of LFE. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly with excellent prioritization.

Three Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of

  Master Director Johnnie To (1080i; 2:30) is a brief look at the director on the job interspersed with equally brief interviews.

  Three Complex Characters (1080i; 3:12) is a similarly brief EPK devoted to the three main characters.

• Trailer (1080p; 1:10)

As tends to be the case with Well Go USA releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically. Previews for other Well Go USA releases are then authored to follow the supplements automatically.

Three Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Three is a film with a relatively unusual setting and a trio of really interesting characters. Perhaps surprisingly, the film attains a high level of tension early on, despite the fact that it's obvious that everything is heading toward a calamitous showdown. Technical merits are strong, and Three comes Highly recommended.