Once or twice in our lifetime, if we were lucky we got woken up from a slumber of our own making. This force majeure jolts us to remember what we long suppressed like why we wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. Nobody wants to grow up working 27 hours a day kowtow to the rich and corrupted. And yet we have grown to accept that as part of growing up and being adults. A Guilty Conscience (2023), starring the multi-talented Wong Chi Wah with an equally impressive supporting cast, tells such a story. Wong plays the titular character, an acerbic tongue attorney, and hence the Chinese title, who was passed over for promotions in part for his failure to manage up. He later quit his job at the bench as a magistrate and went back to private practice with the sole intention of cozying up to the rich or in his words to lick those assholes where presumably money is dripping out.
Lam's scheme to park himself next to the rich quickly falls apart. He was the defense attorney of a mistress who stood accused of child abuse and endangerment of her own young daughter. Her paramour and father of their love child is a doctor and a married man to the daughter of a prominent family. Both families of the married couple are well respected in Hong Kong for their wealth if not for anything else. The child endangerment case against the mistress quickly made a turn for the worst. The child died from injury sustained and his client, the mother of a now deceased child was convicted of manslaughter and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. The conviction in large part was due to Lam's professional negligence--his failure to secure written affidavits from the witnesses, that is from both the father of the diseased and the security guard and Lam's general insouciance towards the case as a whole.
His failure to defend his client left him badly shaken with a guilty conscience, and hence the English title. The silver lining of his legal debacle, if any, is it makes him reassess his life thus far like why he wanted to be an attorney in the first place: it's about justice and helping defend those who can't defend themselves. He vows to save his client using all he's left and can muster. What he lacks in money and powerful connections he more than makes up in his doggedness and not to mention his acerbic tongue to outwit and out maneuver the prosecution. By saving his client he also saves himself from straying from his original ideal of justice for all and to a larger extent righting a rigged justice system that not only favors the rich and powerful but at times also punishes the powerless and penniless. AGC is a welcome departure from the all too common gangster genre forever popular in Hong Kong cinema since the 80s. In present day Hong Kong, people live in extreme wealth disparity and many question law enforcement and the judicial system behind closed doors. Hong Kong nowadays can't even just have simple evil like regular psychopath who kills and dismemebers for pleasure. Instead Hong Kong now has an extreme brutal murder that potentially involves cross border organized crime, corruption, and filthy amount of cash: a case that embodies everything that is wrong in Hong Kong. Lam in his courtroom closing statement utters, "In the past, all were equal in front of the law. Now, the poor suck dick before the law," a sentiment that's widely shared and believed in Hong Kong. AGC provides a two hour reprieve for an audience who has to live everyday brutality that's now Hong Kong.
