Running on Karma

All the world will be your enemy, Prince With a Thousand Enemies

– Watership Down

Though Dai zek lo (Running on Karma, Johnnie To, 2003) follows Big (Andy Lau), a former monk who demonstrates martial prowess, it is not a kung-fu film. Big spends at least one-quarter of the film naked so that we can admire his chiselled form, but Running on Karma is not a comedy. There are cops, crimes, investigations and action-packed chase scenes, but Running on Karma is not a police procedural. Big and his rookie-cop accomplice Lee Fung Yee (Cecelia Cheung) slowly fall into a reluctant yet true kind of love, but Running on Karma is not a romance. Perhaps more so than any of Johnnie To’s other famously genre-defying flicks, Running on Karma dares you to try and neatly categorise it one way or another.

There is an initial temptation to dismiss Running on Karma as nothing but a farce. The film opens with a wonderfully gratuitous ensemble of male strip-dancers performing for a group of eagerly squealing young women, including Lee Fung Yee, who shouts “Big! I love you!” Twirling in the centre of the stage, Big’s absurdly Ken-doll-like figure – accentuated by the fact that Andy Lau is clearly wearing a muscle suit – adds a dimension of surrealism. To’s choice to use a muscle suit only highlights the strangeness of it all, making Big feel like a caricature of a sexualised himbo-macho-man. Big’s very name is a symbol of all he appears to be: a simple, very large, very straightforward man. Instances of strange and farcical movement exist elsewhere, too: in a later scene, an unnamed man is discovered contorted inside a small metal canister at the scene of a crime. Still very much alive, he wiggles impossibly out of the canister like a serpent, and is arrested. Meanwhile at the strip club, Big is egged on to “take it off”. He and the other performers ditch what little underwear they have, only for Lee Fung Yee and the others to pull out their ID badges. They are members of the CID (Hong Kong’s Criminal Investigation Department), and arrest the men for indecent exposure. 

Despite this almost parodic quality, Running on Karma never mocks these characters, nor their suffering. Big isn’t just a stripper: he is also a former monk with a supernatural ability to sense a person’s past life. By seeing a person’s past actions, he can deduce how they will die in the present in a sort of karmic atonement – and has already lost one friend whose death he foresaw. When Big runs naked from the cops after being arrested for stripping, he crashes into the scene of a chase between the CID and their serpentine escapee and is pinned to the ground. Dazed, he looks at a police dog and has a vision of a boy beating a dog, which he understands as meaning that the dog must die in the present. 

In another vision, he sees a WWII Japanese soldier beheading Chinese prisoners and civilians, indicating that this person must die in the present too – only this person is Lee Fung Yee, whose image is overlaid by the ghostlike apparition of the soldier in every shot from Big’s point-of-view. He looks away, pretending not to have seen it, yet his denial catches up with him. Big offers to help Lee Fung Yee (who is always referred to by her full name) with her investigation of the snake-man, using his prophetic karmic knowledge to read the crime scene and gain valuable insights. He proves his physical prowess to her in a beautiful scene where he uses kung fu movements to make a tissue dance in the air, and proves his psychic abilities by using clues only he can detect to track down criminals. He keeps crossing paths with her and though he knows her to be doomed, still rescues her from the serpent-like killer, and then from a fall from a building. In this charmingly silly sequence, Big dives off the edge after her like superman, plummeting dramatically towards the ground and saved by nothing but a wire he conveniently grabs and which is apparently strong enough to hold both of them.

But each time he saves Lee Fung Yee, the vision of the Japanese soldier returns. Big grows desperate, avoiding her and consulting with his former masters at the monastery for advice on averting her karmic fate. “She is acquiring good deeds” they tell him hopefully, hinting that she may be able to atone before meeting an untimely death. Later, Big stops a police officer from beating a criminal while chanting “One Thought Heaven, One Thought Hell” – a Buddhist principle that is similar to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – so that he might not have this violence reflected on himself. This is in line with the karmic principles underlying the film: that every misdeed is paid for, either in this life or the next, and that vengeance only continues this cycle. When Lee Fung Yee pesters him about his avoidance of her, Big reluctantly confesses that he saw her death, and explains how his visions allow him to perceive the karmic nature of the universe: “It is not that I can predict the future, it is that when I see the result, I will see the cause. When I see someone die, or is going to die, then I would know that he is going to die and why.” His supernatural abilities are never omnipotent, however – he painstakingly explains that he sees cycles of good and evil, pain and punishment, but not “the future” in abstract. She is the Japanese soldier, but at the same time she isn’t, explains Big. This is simply the nature of karma. With this new knowledge, Lee Fung Yee subtly alters her life plan with the goal of making her death count for something, by helping Big one last time in restoring justice.

Big seemingly experiences The Four Noble Truths¹ as they relate to the principle of suffering. He suffers physically from police brutality and violence, and mentally from the pain of knowing he will lose someone he loves. His suffering is partly caused by his hedonistic lifestyle, and partly his choosing ignorance of the truth of karma – he sees and knows it, but cannot accept it, so he feigns indifference. When Lee Fung Yee asks him, “do you think this is fair?” he responds “I know it is just but I can no longer be a monk.” His statement is bewildering. To us, Lee Fung Yee does not seem to deserve death. Yet Big understands that her fate is not just about her, but the entire balance of the universe. Still, he is angry at it all, even as he understands the inevitability. 

At the film’s climax, Big learns that Lee Fung Yee has disappeared into the mountains to avenge the death of his childhood friend by tracking down her killer, Sun Ko. Panicked, he follows her but is too late: she has been killed and decapitated, just as the Japanese soldier did to others. Running through a tall, cathedral-like cave, he confronts his shadow-self, a man who became consumed with revenge and spent ten years living in the mountains, waiting to find Sun Ko and kill him. Though initially enraged, Big eventually understands that to meditate with his shadow-self means to break the cycle of suffering, reaching a kind of nirvana. In a complete subversion of what we might expect from an action-oriented cop film, he greets Sun Ko warmly, embraces and forgives him, and walks him down to the waiting police. Thereafter, Big sheds his ragged clothes and dons his monk robes, standing tall without a muscle suit for the first time. Without cinematic slapstick, all pretenses of male chauvinism melt away. Do not mistake this for fatalism, however – Big has accepted that we shape our lives through what cycles we choose to break with our actions. It’s a beautiful, haunting conclusion to an otherwise bizarre and frantic film. Just as Big earlier meditated on the mountainside for days while contemplating the death of a sparrow, Running on Karma ultimately asks us to consider the consequences of hatred, violence and vengeance on the butterfly-effects of our many lives.

Dai zek lo/Running on Karma (2003 Hong Kong 93 mins)

Prod Co: One Hundred Years of Film/Milkyway Image Prod: Johnnie To, Wai Ka-fai Dir: Johnnie To Scr: Wai Ka-fai, Yau Nai-hoi, Au Kin-yee, Yip Tin-shing Phot: Cheng Siu-Keung Ed: Law Wing-cheung Mus: Cacine Wong Prod Des, Cos Des: Bruce Yu Art Dir: Raymond Chan, David Y. Sun

Cast: Andy Lau, Cecilia Cheung, Cheung Siu-fai, Karen Tong, Chun Wong, Wong Wa-wo, Hon Kwok-choi, Yuen Bun, Yu Wenzhong, Hou Liansheng

Endnotes