Johnnie To is one of Hong Kong’s finest film directors, garnering particular success following the city’s 1997 handover to the People’s Republic of China. You can easily divide his career into the earlier less accomplished works prior to the handover, and the much more inventive and sophisticated crime thrillers starting with 1998’s A Hero Never Dies. By 2013 he was riding a wave of genuinely exceptional pictures including Mad Detective (2007), Sparrow (2008), Vengeance (2009), Life Without Principle (2011), and Drug War (2012).

Then comes Blind Detective. It was not unheard of for To to make comedies, although the bulk of them were made earlier in his career. In 2011 he had directed the underrated Don’t Go Breaking My Heart to great commercial success. Blind Detective is a far more overtly humorous film, and re-teams Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng from To’s 2001 hit Love on a Diet. Even upon release it felt a little out of date. Coming back more than a decade later, and it seems like a film half-forgotten and out of time.

Former Hong Kong police detective Johnston (Lau), rendered blind during his final assignment, now works as a private detective. When he encounters female police officer Ho (Cheng), she recognises his talents immediately and forces him to help her solve a decades-old mystery over a missing girl.

The film’s title references To’s earlier film Mad Detective, which starring Lau Ching Wan as Bun, another retired police detective with idiosyncratic methods of solving crimes. While that film was a thoughtful, unsettling sort of drama/thriller, Blind Detective is played as a broad comedy. Slapstick is in plentiful supply, as is a gregarious amount of playful over-acting. Both Lau and Cheng do a great job with this: they’re both immensely appealing performers and clearly share a lot of on-screen chemistry together.

Sadly the film they’re performing in is nowhere near as consistent. Blind Detective is a schizophrenic mess, I think because its writer/director is stuck between earlier and later styles. One minute it is presenting silly character comedy and the next its leads are uncovering the corpses of a dozen murdered women. While it is possible for a film to jump from comedy to drama, or even comedy to horror, Blind Detective fails to make the leap with conviction. Each half of the film interferes with the other, and as a result hardly any of it works.

There are flashes of brilliance: To does a great job visually representing Johnston’s inner thoughts, as he imagines conversations with murder victims and suspects alike. There’s also a fantastic early sequence where Johnston and Ho act out a suspected double homicide, including taking turns between putting on a crash helmet and then smacking the other senseless with a hammer. Many individual elements showcase Johnnie To’s remarkable visual eye and unpredictable narrative technique (he regularly makes up the script for his films as he shoots them). In this particular case, however, it adds up to something rather jarring and annoying to sit through.

You cannot win them all. Pre-existing fans of To’s work will likely enjoy many individual parts of Blind Detective, but if you’re looking to try out his films I’d start with something else. Exiled, perhaps. Or Drug War. Or even Mad Detective.