final_flash

When I first heard about this drama, I had no expectations since I did not want to go in with high hopes, only for them to be dashed because the drama sucked. Well, I can tell you guys now, this drama was great. For now, it is the best HK cop drama of 2025. There were so many high profile actors in this drama that I was worried it would suffer the same "too many protagonist" issue we have with other dramas *cough* Mission Run *cough*, but somehow it worked out.

The story follows three main characters: Bosco Wong as a Senior Inspector of HK Police, Kenneth Ma as a Senior Investigator of the ICAC, and Moses Chan as a DOJ Prosecutor. It covers how these 3 departments later work together - and later become friends - to deal with the big bad. They all have their own personal subplots to deal with, which provided great character building and depth to each of them. And these characters are interwoven so well that it naturally brings them together, which is just how things should be!

So who is the big bad? This drama wastes no time in letting you know who it is, and it is a bastard played by Dominic Lam. Man, I really missed watching this actor in action. Whenever he plays a good character, it is always really empty and shallow, which is quite strange to me, but whenever he plays the bad guy... man I just really hate the character because he plays the bad guy so well. Here, he is a really rich business man who does so many illegal behind-the-scenes deals to make himself extra rich., such as organ trafficking and selling firearms. This guys trusts nobody and so has no family or true friends, just people he finds useful until they are not, and when people are no longer useful he gets rid of them. A true villain and he really shines here. You know from episode 1 he is the big bad, and he evades capture while tormenting the main characters all the way until the last episode. I loved watching this guy as the bad guy.

The main character who suffers the most is Bosco. The 1st episode starts off with a bang as he is escorting a witness, played by Moon Lau, to court to get on the witness stand to testify against Dominic. On the way there, a bunch of mercenaries turn up and start shooting at the cops and killing everybody, just insane action at the beginning - bang bang bang! Bosco does his best but ends up getting knocked unconscious while his entire team was killed by the mercs and Moon Lau is kidnapped so could not make the stand. The only survivors were Bosco Wong and his colleague played by Raymond Cho. Everyone suspects a mole in the police, and all suspicion goes to Bosco because he led the team and survived the onslaught, but of course since he is the main character it's obviously not him.

Raymond Cho just so happened to be the uncle of Kenneth Ma, and so Kenneth doesn't believe his uncle would have been the mole and directs all his ICAC efforts against Bosco. There was a lot of animosity against Bosco until later we discover Raymond really was the mole, making things very awkward for Kenneth. Just when Raymond was going to testify to admit he was the mole because he was being blackmailed, he was once again threatened with his wife's safety, so on the stand he says Bosco was the person who made him do the things he did during episode 1. Nobody believed him as it was obvious he was lying, so Bosco was reinstated as a cop with all cops suspecting him of being bad.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Bosco is kidnapped from his home - along with his wife - to an abandoned oil rig where they do illegal dark web live streams of underground Fight Club, with many people putting bets to see who would survive and who would die in these Battle Royale fights. Meanwhile, the women who are kidnapped get strung up in their nightgowns and whipped on livestream to perverts watching and paying to see more. Bosco only just got back with his wife - played by Jacky Cai - and his wife was pregnant with his child, so this made it extra difficult to watch. Dominic taunts Bosco repeatedly over this fact to make sure Bosco continues to fight in the arena. Man, they eventually escape but at the cost of his wife's life as she is shot by Dominic.

Then we have Moses Chan, a close friend of Kenneth Ma, and who is trying his best to put Dominic behind bars but is unable to because of lack of evidence and witnesses. His love interest played by Jessica Hsuan was an architect but ended up going to prison after her boss - played by Pat Poon - pushed his crimes onto Jessica after she noticed there were some strange numbers with the accounting and gave the details over to Kenneth to investigate. When Jessica ended up in prison, Kenneth felt so guilty for getting her in there that he didn't know how to face her and never visited her for those 8 years. Moses, though, never gave up and kept visiting her and doing his best to get her out. He has a daughter played by Regina Ho who ends up becoming a victim of an illegal organ trafficking ring and getting her kidneys harvested. Why? Believe it or not, it was to save Pat Poon as his kidneys were failing. Pat Poon was a business partner of Dominic, so Dominic was going to hook him up with a new kidney to save his life. They took one kidney but problems occurred that caused the transplant to fail, so they were going to take Regina's other kidney, but luckily the good guys managed to find her and save her.

When Jessica gets out of prison, her first step was to plan revenge against Pat and Dominic because she found out they worked together at the time she was framed and put in prison. She befriended a group of women while in prison, who all decide to help Jessica get revenge out of gratitude for her helping them while locked up. She managed to get a large sum of money from Pat Poon by threatening him at a restaurant, and then used that money to fund her operations to get revenge. With one of her allies, she managed to murder Pat Poon in hospital via lethal injection rather than let the police arrest him after they had enough evidence to nail him. That scene of her coldly telling Pat how she made all the arrangements to make sure Pat suffered kidney failure and then having the chance to go in and kill him was all planned by her. It was a great scene. Sadly, she doesn't go after Dominic because the main characters work out what she did and convinces her to not go down that route, so she turns herself in and ends up back in prison. If there was a character that needed more screen time it would be Jessicas. I wanted more!

We later find out there was another mole in the police department, and this mole was a high ranking one. The drama did great casting here and cast two people who could suspect because historically they have both played bad guy roles: Cheung Kwok Keung and Lawrence Ng. This made it difficult to guess who it was, especially since Lawrence Ng was Bosco's mentor in this drama so Bosco also didn't want to believe his mentor was a bad cop. We eventually discover it is actually Lawrence Ng that had been a secret partner of Dominic since the beginning, but instead of Lawrence just going ham and turning into an evil bastard like he does in his other face-turn roles, he maintains his demeanor and said he only wanted to be a good police officer and help the public, it was just that he kept getting held back by all the red tape. He finally turned witness against Dominic to point out every evil deed he had helped cover up for the bad guy as a way of atonement for his past crimes.

Eventually, the 3 mains get enough evidence and witnesses to nail Dominic and put him behind bars. There was a very clever plan to waste Dominic's time and delay the court date so they could get more evidence by arresting Dominic and detaining him for 48 hours at the police station, and then once he was released he was detained by the ICAC for another 48 hours. Finally, they had enough evidence so when Dominic went to leave the ICAC, he was re-arrested by the cops, and since it was the weekend and he missed the court date, he would have to wait over the weekend to the Monday before court can begin. This was a genius plan by Moses that had me thinking why don't we have more clever tactics like this in other dramas? As Dominic realized he was going to lose the court battle, he had a group of mercenaries storm the courtroom and kill the guards, taking control of the entire courtroom and Dominic basked in his bad guy monolog to everybody in that courtroom. This was great scene because he was so full of himself that when the good guys started fighting back, he just ran like coward, proving he was all talk. This led to a great chase scene that in turn led to a great car park scene, where Bosco and Dom played chicken in their cars, trying to ram into each other. It ends with Bosco getting the upperhand and was about to finish off Dom, but the bros - Moses and Kenneth - appear and stop him from doing it, saying it wasn't worth it and he would end up in prison instead. Bosco stands down, and just as his does, Dom drives his car towards Bosco and knocks him out. Dom ends up in prison anyway for his crimes and Bosco is in a coma, able to spend his coma time with his wife until she forced him to wake up and be a cop again to help people. I have never seen Bosco act so well like at this scene, it was very touching and tugged at the heart strings.

Despite the great scenes, this drama did have three things that annoyed me. The first of these was Him Law. That guy can act, that is for sure, but it feels like he keeps getting typecasted into these roles where he does really stupid and impulsive things that get him into trouble. He was a cop that served under Bosco and had learning difficulties so was unable to get promoted due to failing the written exam. He later takes an investigation too extreme and accidentally kills a gang member he was interrogating and tried to get rid of the evidence. Unfortunately for him, Lawrence Ng found CCTV footage and blackmailed him into assassinating Dominic and doing various things to undermine Police investigations. This led to Bosco suspecting him and eventually discovering that Him was a mole. This culminates into Him regretting all his actions and holding Lawrence Ng at gunpoint during his inauguration ceremony to being made Commissioner of HK Police and telling everybody he was the corrupt cop before un-aliving himself. When I saw Him Law I had a feeling things would turn out this way and prayed that it wouldn't, but it did, and that made me so disappointed because it was so predictable.

The second issue I had was with the theme song. It is a good rock song for sure, but the issue is that they use the song for both the intro and the ending theme, and they make you listen to the entire song in the ending, so after every episode you are forced to listen to the entire song. After 25 episodes, that song really got on my nerves.

The final issue was with the last scene when Bosco visits Dom in prison to talk to him - for some reason. This scene had the worst dubbing I have ever seen in any drama. I understand the need for dubbing if the audio in a place is terrible and it was likely that room had too much echo, requiring the dub, but the dubbing here was so bad it had me going wtf. The sound was not balanced properly, the lips did not sync up with what was being said, and they make it worse but doing close ups of each character's face so you can clearly see this. This was meant to be a cool scene where Bosco's last words to Dom would be the title of the drama "執法者們", but the terrible dubbing really took away from the scene's impact, kinda like going to a theme park but the rides there were all go karts. Why?

Overall, despite the issues I had with the drama, this was a great drama that I would watch again in the future! Worth a watch!