NOTE: Although this DVD is an import from Hong Kong, it is NTSC Region 0 which means that it should play in all DVD players.

A fairly simple premise gives director Pou-Soi Cheang ample opportunity for over the top melodrama and bleak, nihilistic violence in his latest crime film, Dog Bite Dog. A Cambodian named Pang (Edison Chen of the Infernal Affairs trilogy) assassinates a woman at a restaurant in Hong Kong and draws the attention of the local police. A chase ensues and Pang winds up putting a dagger into the throat of Fat Lai, a negotiator, right in front of his partner, Wei (Sam Lee of the Gen-X Cops films). As soon as Wei draws his gone to shoot him, Pang puts his hands up and surrenders and the rest of the squad come running in and arrest him. They take him into custody and find that he'd been hired by the woman's husband, and soon Pang escapes.

Meanwhile, Wei's father (Ka Wah Lam), awakens from the coma that he's been in for the last few months since Wei found out his true nature and overreacted. Because of this, the internal affairs department has been watching Wei. They figure he's a loose canon and that sooner or later he'll snap – they're not far off! Wei makes it his mission to hunt down Pang and pay him back for what he did to his partner and to prove his worth as an honest cop. Unfortunately for Wei, Pang has taken an innocent girl with him after killing shooting her captor at the junkyard where she was being held. This will complicate things far more than either of them could realize as their cat and mouse game comes to a close.

Dog Bite Dog starts off quite well. The characters are well established, the story points out an interesting link between all three of them that binds them together in ways that none of them realize, and the action comes at us with style and intensity. The atmosphere is sufficiently bleak and the cinematography and rough camera work accentuates this quite a bit. Adding to the 'plus side' of things is the fact that the acting from Sam Lee and Edison Chen is top notch, with Lee in particular really getting into his role and showing a darkly serious side that those who have only seen him in comedic roles just might be taken aback by. Unfortunately, the film gets bogged down under the heavy-handedness of its message and the over use of simple metaphors. Pou-Soi Cheang is obviously comparing the acts of the leads to those of wild dogs, he does this with some subtlety at first by showing us a dog looking for food just trying to survive, but if we weren't able to pick up on that, by the middle part of the film he's literally beating us over the head with it, using growling noises during the fight scenes to make sure that there's no way we can miss this rather obvious comparison. On top of this, there's the ending – one of the most completely over the top and unnecessarily melodramatic finales in some time. Whatever success he had in building things up to this point isn't ruined, but it is certainly hurt by the over cooked visuals and the soundtrack that are employed during the last moments of the film.

In the end, Dog Bite Dog does get more right than it gets wrong. It tells a decent story, it features some strong performances, and it has stylish direction, realistic violence that actually adds to that atmosphere without feeling too gratuitous and an interesting underlying theme of paternal redemption. Sadly, it looses control at the end and this really takes away from the replay value of the picture.