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Joseph "Joe" Kwan is the main antagonist of the New Police Story (2004).
He was played by Daniel Wu.
Biography[]
Born into a wealthy family, Joe Kwan's father had been able to climb up the ranks of the Hong Kong Police Force largely due to his father-in-law's connections. Unfortunately, he also had a poor relationship with his wife and son, and had no qualms about verbally and physically abusing both of them. This led to Joe developing a deep-seated hatred for his father, which led to him acting out in destructive ways.
Joe Kwan enjoys high-risk stimulation activities, such as fighting, X-Games, and committing crimes. He eventually meets up with a few other young people from wealthy families, Max, Tin-Tin, Fire, and Sue, who were bored and dissatisfied with life, and had a similar passion for high-risk activities. Together, they commit heinous crimes, starting with the robbery of The Bank of Asia, during which they explicitly ask a bank worker to call the police. A large number of police officers confront the gang outside, and they are shown to play a sadistic game in which they are awarded money for shooting at police officers before making their escape.
During a news report, Inspector Chan Kwok-Wing, a highly-ranking and respected member of the Hong Kong Police Force, announces confidently that the force will apprehend the gang in three hours. Upon their hideout being revealed, Chan leads his squad to arrest the gang in an abandoned warehouse. Unbeknownst to the police, the hideout had been rigged with various traps, and during the raid, the gang jams their radio signals, weakening their ability to communicate with one another. Using various traps, Joe and his gang decimate and capture the entire police squad except for Inspector Chan himself. They proceed to hang all of them from a high ceiling in a large warehouse, where Inspector Chan eventually meets up with them. There, the gang challenges him to training regimes that are taught to police officers. Joe himself defeats Chan in a pistol assembling race, after which the gang kills two police officers by dropping them from the ceiling. The gang ends up killing the rest of the squad as well, except for Chan's future brother-in-law, Hong, who soon ends up dying from his injuries. Following this, the gang blows up the building with explosives.
Joe is not seen again until much later in the film, when he picks his girlfriend and fellow gang member, Sue, who had been wounded by gunfire from Frank Cheng, Inspector Chan's newfound friend, at an X-Games event. It is revealed that Sam Wong, a former member of the Hong Kong Police Force, that he was blackmailed by Joe and his gang into revealing their rigged hideout to Chan's team a year ago, due to the bag of money he took from Sue to pay off his debts.
A wounded Sue barely manages to stagger into a black jeep that Joe had driven to pick up his friends after receiving their distress calls. Upon seeing her wound, Joe angrily fumes before driving off, taking her to the gang's new hideout, where Joe kills her. The gang then accesses Chan's police file on a computer, with Joe bent on taking revenge.
He arranges to meet up with Chan's girlfriend, Ho Yee, in the police station. He wraps a time bomb around her neck before leaving. When Chan learns of the bomb he desperately tries to free her. Ho Yee cuts the wires with no effect, leading the police to believe that it is a fake. But when the two get ready to leave, a small wire attached to Ho Yee's back pulls out the secondary trigger, causing the bomb to explode. Before she can escape, it explodes and some falling pipes land on her, knocking her into a coma. Chan and Frank end up arrested and jailed for acting as and impersonating police officers.
Joe and his gang visit the duo to taunt them, prompting Officer Sa Sa and her father, the jailer, release them illegally. After a group of teens complete the most recent level of the new computer gang, Chan and Frank find out that the next target is the Bank of Hong Kong, located in the New Wing of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Once they arrive, Chan and Frank bring in the parents of the gang members to cause dissent. Joe is the only one whose parents were not brought in, his father being the police chief. Max, one of the gang members, feels ashamed and tries to run down the escalators to see his parents, but Joe shoots him dead in revenge, provoking panic among the public and causing a shootout to erupt between the gang and Inspector Chan, the latter being aided by his new partner, Frank. Frank manages to shoot Fire in the leg with his own gun, severely wounding him, and Chan defeats Tin Tin in a hand-to-hand combat, before Tin Tin himself gets severely wounded in the chest by Joe's gunfire.
When the Special Duties Unit of the Hong Kong Police Force arrives, Joe flees and chases Frank all the way to the roof of the Convention Centre, and captures him, tying him up, hanging him by the side of the building. When Chan arrives, he attempts to convince Joe to surrender, pointing out that the building is surrounded by police. He also reveals his knowledge that Joe does not actually hate the police, but rather, he hates his abusive father and himself. Hearing this, Joe is enraged, and threatens to throw Frank to his death. He then challenges Chan to the exact same challenge as a year before, assembling a Glock semi-automatic pistol, with Frank's life is being wagered this time. Chan manages to win through placing the ammunition cartridge into the chamber directly rather than loading it into the magazine, saving him a few precious milliseconds, much to Joe's chagrin.
Following this, a large number of police officers arrive on the roof, along with Joe's father, the chief. Joe's father insults his son without relent, calling him names such as "garbage" and scolding his son for having brought shame upon the family. Chan urges Joe to surrender. Joe admits defeat, and unloads his pistol, before aiming the empty gun at Chan and his own father. He is then shot twice in the chest by a police sniper, killing him. Seeing his son dying before his own eyes, his father cries out in pain and anguish.
Personality[]
Joe Kwan proves to be a ruthlessly cruel, sociopathic, sadistic, vindictive, violent, reckless, arrogant, vicious, and utterly pitiless individual. He is shown to enjoy high-risk stimulation activities such as fighting, X-Games, committing violent crime, all for rush of adrenaline it brings him and his friends. When he and his gang are confronted by Inspector Chan after his entire squad is captured by the gang, they laugh incessantly him with derision as they defeat Chan in various contestants, including hand-to-hand combat and pistol assembly, getting pleasure out of tormenting and humiliating Chan.
He showed utterly no mercy nor respect towards the police and other authorities, possessing no redeeming qualities whatsoever, other than a desire to constantly engage in high-risk stimulation activities. While his anger was seemingly directed towards police, the reality is that he possessed a deep-seated hatred and bitterness towards his father, who mistreated him relentlessly both physically and mentally as a child and teen, through beating him, handcuffing him, and insulting him. Up until the very end, Joe showed neither regret nor remorse for his actions.
By the time he was faced with his father, Inspector Chan, and a large number of police officers on the roof of the Exhibition Centre, he had lost everything, including his friends, and his wealth. Chan encourages Joe to surrender, knowing that Joe's hatred was not directed towards police, but rather towards his father. Joe's final act of pointing an empty gun at his father shows that his true hatred was directed towards him. His father likewise proved to be a ruthless, brutal, and abusive individual, who did not realize the damage that he had done until it was too late, when his son was shot dead by a police sniper.
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