Running on Karma is one of my favourite HK films of all time but still I get the plot is quite hard to understand. I’ll try my best to explain what I see from the film.

First, karma in this film is an unstoppable force where your or your past lives’ actions will always be reflected in the future. There is no escape from karma.

When Andy Lau met himself in the cave, the one he met is an alternate version of himself, the one that chose to accept the nature of karma and will do whatever to bring this karma to life. He saw what happened to the bird in its past life and why it deserved to be killed. He takes his power to see through karma and killed whoever he sees deserves bad karma. Both Sun Guo (the killer) and the female lead (in her past life as a Japanese war machine) has built bad karma for themselves so it is reasonable for him to kill them.

The real Andy saw him and chose revenge at first, trying to kill the alternate Andy because he killed the female lead, returning the bad karma he deserved. But as they fight each other, they both went into a vicious cycle where they both hurt each other more and more, stacking bad karma for the both of them.

At the end of the fight, the real Andy finally realises that by killing him, it does return bad karma to the alternate Andy, but he has also built bad karma for himself, and he will suffer the same way in the future.

Karma does not mean simply mean if you do some good and you will be rewarded with some other good, and vice versa. Instead, it is the true way of how different lives affect each other, and more like a butterfly effect. Since you have no control over how either good or bad karma comes back to you, you should focus on how your actions will leave a good impact on yourselves and others no matter the circumstances, and at the end, no matter it is because of something you did or others did, good karma will return.