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This review contains spoilers.
I’m used to how Hong Kong’s distinct historical and political subtext worms its way into its movies, even seemingly lightweight ones. Something like Police Story provides an obvious example, moving from a cheerful action comedy (full of breathtaking, death-defying action sequences) to something angrier, where the hero has been left to fend for himself by the institutions he once served but has lost faith in (but still with breathtaking, death-defying action sequences). But even then, that movie has its share of levity throughout, and ends on a note that I certainly wouldn’t call bleak. Perhaps it’s on me for not looking too much into this movie beforehand, but I was struck by how bleak this is. Within the first few minutes, an entire family is killed in order to sink the case against a pair of mobsters. Dismayed, the prosecutor decides to take the law into his own hands. But while in Police Story, the hero taking the law into his own hands got results and saved the day, the same thing here maybe does take down the criminal mastermind, but gets a lot of other people killed along the way.
I watched the Hong Kong cut and one of the alternate endings (my copy, freshly arrived in the mail from 88 Films, includes a few other cuts that I understand have different endings). Both of them end with the hero dead. The Hong Kong cut maybe leaves a bit of room for ambiguity, with the hero’s body floating in the water after he dives out of a plane right as it crashes, but the alternate ending ends with a grim punchline, with a group of partiers on a nearby boat choosing to ignore the corpse so that it doesn’t ruin their fun. I think I prefer the former, in part because I wanted to believe that the hero survived, but also because it ends things right at the peak of a crescendo. The latter drives the themes home, but allows things to come back down. Or to use punctuation, it’s an exclamation mark versus a period or ellipses. I guess I’m like Elaine Benes in that I’d opt for the former.
The hero is played by Yuen Biao, who I’d previously known mostly as a supporting player in the movies of his better known friends and co-stars Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. (The three of them make up my most watched actors this year, according to my Letterboxd stats.) In those other movies, he usually had an offbeat, likable presence, bouncing off Jackie and Sammo to hit a different set of comedic notes. (My favourite is probably his role in Dragons Forever, where he navigates his political and philosophical confusion and tension between capitalism and communism through his treatment of his pets.) Disappointment might be the wrong word, but I was definitely caught a little off guard by how seriously he plays things here. He’s effective in the role, and it’s the right tone for the surrounding film, but I did miss the quirkiness of his other roles. To the extent that there is levity here, it’s provided by the dynamic between a slobbish cop played by director Corey Yuen and his doting father played by Wu Ma, but like I alluded to earlier, nobody here gets a happy ending.
But while this is certainly a grim movie, it’s far from a joyless one, in that it’s directed with a constant forward momentum and packed full of top notch action sequences. I don’t know what I can say about the action here that would meaningfully differ from anything I’ve said about other classic Hong Kong action movies. I need to get better at discussing technical matters; the two touches that stood out to me were the uses of undercranking and body doubles, which are less offensive here than usual because of how relentlessly the action hurtles ahead. But one is simultaneously in awe and likely wincing as they see one crackling, fast paced, painful-looking action scene after another, whether it’s Biao taking down a group of assassins (which include a Mick Jagger lookalike and a gunman with an accordion), trying to avoid getting flattened in a cramped garage while the villains try to play bumper cars, Cynthia Rothrock and Karen Shepard going (wo)mano a (wo)mano (this apparently was notable for casting non-Chinese actresses in a Hong Kong movie in a non-gimmicky way), or Biao chasing after a plane on foot in the breathtaking (and death-defying) finale.
Righting Wrongs (Yuen, 1986)
This review contains spoilers.
I watched the Hong Kong cut and one of the alternate endings (my copy, freshly arrived in the mail from 88 Films, includes a few other cuts that I understand have different endings). Both of them end with the hero dead. The Hong Kong cut maybe leaves a bit of room for ambiguity, with the hero’s body floating in the water after he dives out of a plane right as it crashes, but the alternate ending ends with a grim punchline, with a group of partiers on a nearby boat choosing to ignore the corpse so that it doesn’t ruin their fun. I think I prefer the former, in part because I wanted to believe that the hero survived, but also because it ends things right at the peak of a crescendo. The latter drives the themes home, but allows things to come back down. Or to use punctuation, it’s an exclamation mark versus a period or ellipses. I guess I’m like Elaine Benes in that I’d opt for the former.
The hero is played by Yuen Biao, who I’d previously known mostly as a supporting player in the movies of his better known friends and co-stars Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung. (The three of them make up my most watched actors this year, according to my Letterboxd stats.) In those other movies, he usually had an offbeat, likable presence, bouncing off Jackie and Sammo to hit a different set of comedic notes. (My favourite is probably his role in Dragons Forever, where he navigates his political and philosophical confusion and tension between capitalism and communism through his treatment of his pets.) Disappointment might be the wrong word, but I was definitely caught a little off guard by how seriously he plays things here. He’s effective in the role, and it’s the right tone for the surrounding film, but I did miss the quirkiness of his other roles. To the extent that there is levity here, it’s provided by the dynamic between a slobbish cop played by director Corey Yuen and his doting father played by Wu Ma, but like I alluded to earlier, nobody here gets a happy ending.
But while this is certainly a grim movie, it’s far from a joyless one, in that it’s directed with a constant forward momentum and packed full of top notch action sequences. I don’t know what I can say about the action here that would meaningfully differ from anything I’ve said about other classic Hong Kong action movies. I need to get better at discussing technical matters; the two touches that stood out to me were the uses of undercranking and body doubles, which are less offensive here than usual because of how relentlessly the action hurtles ahead. But one is simultaneously in awe and likely wincing as they see one crackling, fast paced, painful-looking action scene after another, whether it’s Biao taking down a group of assassins (which include a Mick Jagger lookalike and a gunman with an accordion), trying to avoid getting flattened in a cramped garage while the villains try to play bumper cars, Cynthia Rothrock and Karen Shepard going (wo)mano a (wo)mano (this apparently was notable for casting non-Chinese actresses in a Hong Kong movie in a non-gimmicky way), or Biao chasing after a plane on foot in the breathtaking (and death-defying) finale.