"As a vehicle for Dayo Wong, a perennially popular Hong Kong stand-up comedian whose film credits are sparse, A GUILTY CONSCIENCE consciously aligns itself to Wong's comedic tonality and eloquence. The whole shebang is about a man with a good conscience fighting against the insurmountable plutocratic pressure and righting his own wrongs, a time-honored road-to-redemption trajectory that no real surprise is primed, even the case itself is self-evident in mid stream via a flashback. What hooks audience is the anticipation to see how those moneyed, callous bastards to be vanquished despite of their insuperable privileges, and Ng's film doesn't disappoint in this regard, in particular when the senior prosecutor (Tse Kwan-Ho, inimitably august and inscrutably righteous) shifts his ground and lays into the culprit, although juridically speaking, some of the elocution smacks of fanfaronade, tailored to create some semblance of a rousing contentment which has been deployed ad nauseam in similar situations, at the end of the day, justice must prevails, and audience feel good about it. In a sense, A GUILTY CONSCIENCE's crowd-pleasing felicity actually mirrors THE SPARRING PARTNER's flinty gaze upon the society's underside, both are justifiable for their own conception, but the latter requests some mettle to forge through."
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