WAR is the continuation of politics by other means, so the oft-quoted line goes.

It may come as something of a surprise, but this pretty much describes Johnnie To’s Election 2, a film about triad warfare that manages to transmute the usual lowlife politics of Hong Kong mobsters into a harrowing vision of national despair.

If the first Election movie pokes fun at the irony of people not being able to vote for their leaders when gangsters can, then the sequel ups the ante by openly lambasting the state of politics in HK.

Politicians and gangsters: what’s the difference?

In this new movie the mobsters are – figuratively and literally – politicians, whose turfs are their constituencies, whose influences are secured through bribes and backroom deals, and whose interests are unhesitatingly backed up by strong-arm tactics when subtlety fails.

And always in the background, monitoring, hinting, encouraging, pulling the strings, their presence felt even when absent, are the Chinese authorities. As one of the characters remarks to a mainland official when he realises the extent of the Chinese authority’s reach: “Your influence impresses me, but it also frightens me.”

Welcome to the political realities of HK, the film tells us.

Election 2 picks up the story two years after the last underworld election. Although Tony Leung’s ambitious mobster is now six feet under, a Best Actor award to show for the over-the-top acting, the scene is set for another round of blood-soaked manoeuvring for the coveted position of chairman of the mob.

This time around the two candidates running for office are Simon Yam’s incumbent Ah Lok and Louis Koo’s college-educated Jimmy. Malaysian viewers will probably wonder why Ah Lok is still very much a player, because wasn’t he arrested for murder at the end of the last movie?

Well, yes, he was – but only for the benefit of Malaysian viewers. The version that played in our cinemas featured a morally correct ending that makes clear to gullible Malaysians, lest we get the wrong idea, that crime DOES NOT pay. Okay?

Alternate realities notwithstanding, Ah Lok did get away with murder, his reversion into animal savagery in the countryside in the finale leaving the monkeys bewildered but the police none the wiser for it.

And so, Ah Lok returns.

And, as incumbents are wont to do, he wants another term, and woe betide anyone who stands in his way. While Jimmy at first refuses to even entertain the idea of contesting, he finds circumstances outside his control conspiring to make him run for office.

Mentor and protégé then become rivals, and the worst kind of enemies. What follows are Machiavellian machinations that are fuelled in turns by blood and by money.

Essentially, Election 2 is the gangster movie as political commentary, with the triad and its vicious, obscure inner workings being held up as a metaphor for how the Special Administrative Region of HK is being run: In a self-serving way. Heedless. Opaque. Removed.

It is a grim prognosis and not a pretty metaphor at all.

The world To has created for his political allegory is unremittingly bleak, its filmic space shadowy and full of danger, populated by characters that are self-serving, ruthless and undifferentiating, driven only by their abiding devotion to power or to money. Or both.

It is a world devoid of ideals. A world in which a mobster finds he must, of all things, straighten a truant son who is drawn to teenage gangs. A world that must, perhaps necessarily, be ugly and off-putting. This very quality which informs and animates Election 2 also ensures that it is a film that – for all its courage, ambition and craft – one would not like to revisit.

Like To’s more arty films, Election 2 is beautifully controlled, measured even in instances of violent excess, with scenes that confidently build up tension and drama with silence and movement. In spite of all this, Election 2 is not terribly involving, for there are no characters with which to align ourselves – not the poker-faced Jimmy, not the shark-like Lok, not anybody.

Prey and predator, protagonist and antagonist – these are such fluid, interchangeable categories that one can only watch with dispassion the showdown that sinks them all, victor and vanquished alike, into the moral mud-hole that is their world.

I’m inclined to think that Election 2 is really a remake of an earlier (and better) film by To, but with the politics now made explicit.

The Longest Nite, directed by Patrick Tam but widely credited to producer To, is also about a violent shake-up in the triad world. It is a film that draws us into the life-and-death struggles of the characters, only to pull the rug from under our feet with an ominous ending that reduces all that precedes it to a mere clash of midgets.

This new film is, by comparison, less mysterious, more contrived, its politics tending to overwhelm its story. Election 2 isn’t To’s best work, but – strident and relevant – it is, all the same, quite a film. A must-see. W