Mr Sausage wrote: Fri Jun 21, 2024 3:07 pm
Ringo Lam
City on Fire (1987)
A blistering portrait of Hong Kong in all its dirty splendour. The bars, clubs, and cafes are conventional to urban crime thrillers, but Hong Kong is especially suited to them, and Lam makes the most of his extensive location shooting to show a crowded, rushing urban life full of grime and neon. You feel Chow Yun-Fat’s sweaty desperation as he rushes about Hong Kong trying to keep his precarious life from spiraling out altogether. This is not a blood soaked, bullet ballet heroic bloodshed film, this is a nervy crime thriller, and most of the action is tense or brutal, without any chance for heroics. The people here are just trying to keep one step ahead of disaster. Given all the discourse these days about copaganda, it’s interesting how often Hong Kong movies refuse to valourize the police. Here, they’re squabbling and incommunicative, frequently powerless, ready to commit human rights abuses, and more concerned about their petty fiefdoms than upholding justice. Tho’ Chow Yun-Fat plays an undercover detective, it’s his fellow officers rather than the gang of thieves who are the bad guys. If the film has a flaw, it’s that its jittery narrative doesn’t give enough time to developing Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee’s relationship, instead trying to shove a movie’s worth of developing camaraderie into the final thirty minutes. I liked the movie when I saw it back in high school, but I was watching it under the shadow of John Woo, and part of me was disappointed it wasn’t a heroic bloodshed tale full of intense shootouts. Now I’m able to see Lam’s film without that baggage, on its own terms, and I loved it. It’s an exhilarating movie.
Replicant (2001)
The plot is phenomenally stupid: Jean-Claude Van Damme is a serial killer, and in order to catch him the government clones him and pairs the clone, who’s mildly psychic, with Michael Rooker’s cop in the hopes that this will somehow let them catch the killer. Yes, this is the third time in his career Van Damme is playing twins (the fourth if you count
Timecop). I like Van Damme’s films with Tsui and Woo, but his work with Lam has never been that interesting. You can’t even tell Lam did those movies; his style and themes are nowhere to be found. The filmmaking here is better than usual for a DTV action film, but not enough for me to guess that Ringo Lam had anything to do with it. Seems Lam was more JCVD’s director for hire than the driving force on set.
In Hell (2003)
Van Damme is not a forward looking action star. He’s been trying to return to his glory days since at least the mid 90s. There have been his various attempts to redo
Bloodsport (eg.
The Quest), his three
Universal Soldier sequels, his recent
Kickboxer reboot series, his three identical twin movies--and this, his second attempt at
Death Warrant. Van Damme is sent to a Russian prison after murdering the man who’d killed his wife. While this kind of bleak look at failed institutions is solidly in Ringo Lam’s wheelhouse—indeed he did a prison movie himself, the enjoyable
Prison on Fire--he blunts his message by setting it in Russia, othering the institution and playing into western expectations rather than holding them up for examination.
In Hell may be considerably more brutal and hopeless than
Prison on Fire, but it’s less disturbing. There was a lot of humanity in
Prison on Fire for the systemic failures to crush, and a lot of pretense to humaneness when the system is anything but. Here, as expected, the system has no failings; it’s doing what it was designed to do: brutalize people openly and capriciously. But there’s also a streak of sentimentality Lam’s earlier film did not have. So for all its brutality and callousness, this is a less despairing movie than Lam’s
...On Fire series. This is also a
Bloodsport redo, as the prison has an underground fighting ring. Don’t be fooled like I was into expecting that Van Damme means a fun, exciting DTV martial arts prison film like the
Undisputed franchise. No, this is a dour, unenjoyable movie with little in the way of martial arts. Yep, they made Van Damme your average blue collar guy without much fight training. This has none of the energy and excitement of Lam’s Hong Kong work.
Undisputed 2 is pretty much the exact same movie and it’s way more entertaining (and has Scott Adkins in his prime). Watch that instead.
Full Alert (1997)
One of Lam’s grimmer movies, full of people trapped in their own anger and trauma, with Hong Kong as a maze that cannot be escaped. Despite the conventional violence of its action plot, the movie is skeptical of the worth of violent action. While it’s conventional for the good and bad guy to share an odd bond despite their opposition, here their bond is founded on mutual trauma, with both men hagridden by the guilt and shame at having killed another human being. Murder is another trap in this movie, whatever side of the law it’s done on. Each murder in the film takes on a fatalistic importance, dooming characters to further unwanted violence even as they are wracked and haunted by their actions. You see the characters compelled by circumstance and poor choices to sink into their worser selves, consumed by fear, anger, desperation, and hopelessness. The finale, a horrorshow of people casting off every humane impulse that had held their flaws in check, is the angriest I’ve ever seen Lam, the most fatalistic and even nihilistic. I’m wary of reducing the subtext of every Hong Kong film to the handover, but it’s impossible not to read Lam’s film as a final disgusted look at Hong Kong as an angry, violent place of dirt, venality, and crime where institutions are collapsing and escape is finally impossible. Whatever fleeting hope there might have been that Hong Kong could somehow avert, circumvent, or wriggle out of its fate is gone forever. Bleak and unpleasant as the movie is, tho', it’s also exciting and energetic, with Lam’s customary excellence at capturing the gritty essence of the city of Hong Kong. Frankly Lam is at his best in films like these: angry, vulgar, roughly made stories of trapped, desperate people. He had a feeling for that material that filled his movies with excitement. In style and tone, this is a really a Milky Way movie before Milky Way had even got going. Johnnie To could’ve easily directed (or ghost directed) this movie at the time, tho’ he no doubt would’ve made something less bleak and more prankish. But Lam managed to capture the essence of what Milky Way would make their house style during the late 90s. Lam in many ways set the tenor for HK crime films in the post handover period.
Undeclared War (1990)
An international political thriller starring Olivia Hussey and Vernon Wells, alongside Lam regulars Danny Lee and Rosamund Kwan. In style and tone, the film resembles cold war thrillers of the time, except for a tell-tale rhythm and gusto to the action that signals a Hong Kong director. Indeed, the opening church shootout is brilliant, a familiar mixture of explosive momentum, perfect timing, and ridiculousness. The plot itself is a riff on
Nighthawks, with Vernon Wells in the Rutger Hauer role (complete with a platinum blonde dye job), Peter Liapis in the Sylvester Stallone role as a CIA agent on the trail of terrorists in Hong Kong, and Danny Lee as a Hong Kong police inspector forced to deal with all the gweilo bullshit. The movie is inconsistent and often clumsy. It has trouble keeping track of its characters—Hussey, Wells, and Kwan disappear for long stretches—and the thriller plot spins in circles for much of the movie, with its villains having unclear plans and motivations. Indeed, both Kwan and Hussey’s characters are superfluous to the story. The film needed a tighter script and fewer action cliches. Yet, for all that, the movie’s terrifically entertaining, bristling with energy, and showing Lam’s talent for buddy dynamics and impeccable eye for location filming. I had more fun watching this than a lot of more solidly constructed thrillers. The pacing is relentless. And the movie has maybe the best boat chase I’ve ever seen, all down to stunt work so dangerous that it barely counts as stunts, they’re literally just slamming actual boats into each other at top speed while the guys on board try to avoid being crushed to death.
Prison on Fire 2 (1991)
It’s odd to find a movie both very entertaining and pointless. There’s plenty of charm and energy, but it’s in service of very little. Most of the movie replays the first, with Chow Yun-Fat’s increasingly fraught interactions with a shit heel guard (played by a glowering Elvis Tsui this time) bringing things to a head. The rest is a prison break movie, tho’ a prison break movie uninterested in the most interesting part: the planning and execution stages. The focus is directed at the portion where they’re on the lam, which is excitingly shot and edited, but relies too often on the convention where throwing a bucket slows down, like, four guys at a time. But for all the redundancy and indifference to genre mechanics, this is still great fun. Chow has never been more charming and intense, and Lam again shows expert pacing, knowing how to carry you from incident to incident without getting bogged down, but also without moving too quickly to be satisfying. For an unnecessary grab at past glory, this is a much better film than it ought to be.
Burning Paradise (1994)
Lam’s first and only wuxia, made for Tsui Hark and his studio. Another in a long tradition of kung fu stories about the burning of the shaolin temple by the Quin dynasty: Chinese folk hero Fong Sai-Yuk is captured by the Manchus as he flees the temple’s destruction and is made a slave of the Red Lotus Temple, where he and other captured monks work in a
Temple of Doom inspired underground mine. Corey Yuen had scored a pair of hits with his Jet Li starring
Fong Sai Yuk films the year prior, so it’s hard not to see this as Tsui’s attempt to cash in. I’m not sure Lam’s talents were suited to wuxia. This is pretty good--it’s often exciting, and the photography in the deserts of northern China is terrific--but aside from a few conceits here and there and a trap-filled finale, it lacks the wildness of
Swordsman II or
Butterfly and Sword, and it’s a much stiffer, drearier film than Corey Yuen’s
Fong Sai Yuk films or Yuen Woo-Ping’s mid-90s work like
Iron Monkey and
Tai Chi Master. Tsui himself would overgo it with his own apocalyptic wuxia,
The Blade, the following year. There were a lot of these kinds of movies at the time, and Lam’s go at it doesn’t stand out amongst the competition. This isn’t the forgotten masterpiece Vinegar Syndrome are claiming, but it
is a competent, sometimes imaginative movie, with some fun set pieces and gothic set design.
The Adventurers (1995)
I had a tough time getting past how stupid this movie is. Andy Lau’s family is murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he’s a kid. When he grows up, he joins the air force, becomes an ace fighter pilot, seeks revenge on the guy who betrayed his father, fails, and then is recruited by the CIA to go to America to become a gang leader in Chinatown so he can eventually kill his family’s murderer whom the CIA also want dead, a plan that involves him kidnapping and then marrying his target’s daughter. Figure that mess out. There were some faces here I was glad to see, like Victor Wong, whom I’d never seen outside of American films before, and David Chiang. Not so much Andy Lau, one of my least favourite performers from the era. Rosamund Kwan’s also here, wasted in another thankless role even the movie often forgets about. And then there’s Jacky Wu, whose fun, spunky performance is the best part of the movie, so of course she’s written out of the third act. Lam does a reliable job lending it all style and energy, but not enough to paper over the complete shambles that is this movie’s story (I’m pretty sure they made it up as they went along).
Sky on Fire (2016)
In the 80s, Lam forged his reputation on a series of biting indictments of modern Hong Kong institutions, all titled
...On Fire. To my mind, the best of them is the bleak
School on Fire, but
City on Fire and
Prison on Fire are masterpieces in their own right. The last was 1991’s
Prison on Fire 2, until 15 years later Lam revived the series with
Sky on Fire. The titular “sky” is a gigantic skyscraper that houses a biotech firm. If you squint, you might be able to see this entry as an indictment of big pharma, but it would require a lot of interpretive creativity. Lam seems only to be trading on past glory here, as there is no social or institutional subject under scrutiny. Mostly this is a bland thriller, with the biotech company merely a stand-in for any big organization that could have secrets, plots, and such, and with the Stem cell research driving the plot being only a MacGuffin standing in for any vague research that either saves lives or becomes the ultimate weapon familiar from a million thrillers of this kind. It’s pretty non-specific, with none of Lam’s former interest how systems interact with everyday lives, nor even much interest in everyday people except as opportunities for melodrama. There are plenty of shots of well-groomed people in fancy apartments, but little of the grit and authenticity that quickened the other films. Lam’s visual style seems to’ve left him, too, as the film has only overlit, textureless digital photography, reams of bad CGI for everything from backgrounds, to skylines, to rotorblades, to fires, to explosions, to water from hoses, and otherwise no visual signature that would suggest a long-time auteur. The photography is just so...pristine, the interiors clean and uncluttered, and the colours neutral and inoffensive. It’s a shock if you remember the bustling, crowded, grimy locations that characterized Lam’s work of the 80s and 90s. This one has the slick, manicured look of modern Chinese cinema. The polish is a poor substitute for the jerky wildness of Lam’s heyday. The actors are similarly bland, all pretty and anonymous, without distinctive or interesting qualities. Hong Kong directors often struggled with coherence, but not Lam, his films were always clear and effectively told, no matter how complicated the material. This one is a mess, though, with plenty of confusing flashbacks and characters either without established motivation or who change allegiances without set up or explanation. If you want a perfect summation of how lame the film is: it ends with everything literally on fire. That said, the action scenes are excellent. Very much not the action style of the golden age of HK cinema—in fact it shows the influence of
John Wick, so Hong Kong cannibalizing itself at one remove—but exciting and effectively shot and choreographed all the same. A disappointing final feature for Lam.
Esprit D’amour (1983)
Lam’s first film, a supernatural romance for Cinema City where a young insurance investigator is haunted by the ghost of a pretty girl whose death he’s investigating. It’s fluff, silly and inconsequential, with that vulgar style of overdone humour Hong Kong loved so much. What makes the film worth watching is Lam’s youthful energy. He fills the thing with enough moody style, creative transitions, and expressive compositions for a few movies, and unecessarily, since a romantic comedy like this doesn’t demand it. You feel a young director brimming with ideas and creativity, looking for any excuse to show off. The movie looks great, showing even here Lam’s sense for location work and feel for the expressive qualities of Hong Kong’s streets, back alleys, and night life. An early ouija session cross cut with the woman’s death is a highlight, finding ever more energetic ways to transition between scenes, and using a mobile camera to bring us in and out of the ouija circle as the seance progresses. It’s hard to make a bunch of people sitting around a table interesting to look at, and Lam’s done it. But the movie’s best scene outdoes it at the same game, cross cutting an interpretive dance performance that seems to comment directly on the action with an intense exorcism, so that between them we see what’s happening on both physical and spiritual planes. The movie doesn’t sustain this visual energy, often flagging into pedestrian filmmaking in the middle half, when the plot really takes over. One third of the film was shot by another director, Leong Po-Chih, who was replaced by Lam after arguments with the producer. I can’t know for sure, but it feels like the middle section, with its often prosaic blocking and camera sets ups, were shot by Leong, with Lam handling the more stylish and inventive first and third sections plus the more moody stuff in between (eg. the morgue, the newspaper alley, the second rooftop scene, the first haunting). They really do feel like different movies. Lam’s clearly making a more emotionally intense romantic drama, while Leong was going for light comedy. There’s some severe whiplash when the movie goes from silly hijinks to blood and thunder exorcisms, or when it ends with in a fury of passion, loss, and melancholy when the whole relationship we watched develop was merely cute. It’s a fascinating experience, even if the movie isn’t ultimately satisfying as a story in itself. Tsui Hark had just founded Hong Kong’s first SFX department at Cinema City while doing
Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain that same year, and Lam makes use of it for some primitive special effects involving double exposure and super impositions. The movie’s not funny, but I did laugh at one moment where the investigator is making out with the ghost, and his girlfriend walks in to see him rolling around on the couch by himself. It’s stupid, but it worked.
Aces Go Places 4 (1986)
An important film for Ringo Lam. Tho’ nothing more than another entry in a long-running series of manic action comedies, its success at the Hong Kong box office gave Lam the chance to finally do a personal project after years of being a director for hire on romantic comedies for Cinema City. The result was
City on Fire the next year, the film that launched his career. There’s more of a focus on action in this entry than the other two I’ve seen. There’s a hockey game (hockey in Hong Kong?!) between the Hong Kong police and Interpol, in which the two teams are inexplicably wearing the uniforms of the Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadians. Neither Karl Maka or Sam Hui look particularly comfortable skating. I’m not the biggest fan of the
Aces Go Places style of comedy, but some of the action and physical comedy in here is astounding, including a locker room fight with a breathless series of painful looking gags in which people are knocked over, through, and into seemingly every object in the room. There’re also way too many scenes of Sally Yeh and Sylvia Chang being brutally beaten by large men, and too much humour involving child endangerment (maybe the stricter gun laws in Hong Kong allowed them them to find more humour in the idea of a toddler playing around with a loaded handgun?). There is one insane stunt here that takes the old action stand-by of crashing a car into a room, shot in slow motion from inside, and ups it by having there be stunt actors inside at the same time, all of whom have to jump out of the way to avoid being creamed by the car. You can tell one guy misjudged how quickly the car would be coming, because he nearly doesn’t make it. And there’s one bit where a prop plane has to land on a road and ends up leapfrogging a series of cars, something I’d never seen done before. More hair raising examples of Hong Kong’s reckless commitment to stunt work.
