Metacritic reviews

As a film concerned with the power of perception, The Goldfinger largely succeeds as a style exercise.

Leung Chiu-wai has a predatory glint behind the salesman’s grin, and Lau has the beaten look of a man bested for much of the movie. What’s really missing is a Leung/Lau face off, an epic confrontation.

It feels like a film that has already gone through the remake process, casting all the stuff that made it interesting in the first place aside and leaving only the glossy surfaces.

The Goldfinger isn’t per se bad. It’s consistently watchable, Lau and Leung are capable actors, and the narrative––even if standardized––is interesting. But this is perfunctory in a way Infernal Affairs never was.

This has the brash swagger of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the labyrinthine intricacies of the case may present something of a challenge to anyone not well versed in stock market manipulation.

Not the reunion between Lau and Leung that fans might have been craving, nor the decadent deep-dive into Hong Kong’s boom-time that the film could and should have been.