"Banality of evil" is a phrase used by Hannah Arendt in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.
Fallen Angels (1995) is Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's best known film. His films in collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle are characterized by style over substance, as the plots are typically simple. In my opinion, he has been influenced by Sergio Leone's late-1960s spaghetti westerns (an Ennio Morriconesque theme appears towards the end of the film) as well as producer Michael Mann's stylistic influence world wide in his Miami Vice episodes (1984-1989). The show became noted for its heavy integration of music and visual effects to tell a story. It is recognized as one of the most influential television series of all time.
Hitman Wong Chin-Ming (Leon Lai) has a mysterious partner (Michelle Reis) who cleans his dingy apartment and faxes him blueprints of places he is to go hit in his murder for hire manner. We are privy to his inner thoughts when he states "The best thing about my profession is there's no need to make decisions. Who's to die, when, where. It's all been planned by others." Just like Nazi war time criminals, the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking in 1937, the station masters in the Belgian Congo, etc., there percolates this notion that the perpetrators are taking orders and not subject to moral issues.
