D:
Alfred Cheung. P: Sammo Hung. W: Alfred Cheung, Keith Wong. Ph: Peter Ngor. M:
Violet Lam Man-Yee. St: Yuen Biao (Hsiang Ming), Pat Ha (Chui Pai), Charlie
Chin (Superintendent Lu), Lo Lieh (Hsi), Idy Chan (Inspector Lo Huan)
“I only kill for money”
A
neon noir, by way of Heroic Bloodshed, Cheung’s film channels the excesses of
Hong Kong’s sanguinary grandmasters, John Woo and Ringo Lam, for something far
more intimate but no less intense. The spectre of impending Chinese rule looms
over the drama; it is demonstrated in the principal players’ desperate lunge
for fast money and a way out before the free market turns Red.
An
actor with a substantial number of credits behind the camera, Cheung had helmed
a number of romantic comedies before taking on this serious-minded thriller. Cheung
is abetted by a career-best performance from Biao as a desperate cop whose only
hope of survival – and protecting his daughter – is to ally with Chui, the female
killer who gunned down his vice-cop wife. As unlikely relationships go, the
bond between killer and cop is one of the most difficult to digest. Hong Kong
cinema has a wealth of them – City on
Fire, Hard Boiled, The Killer. In this case, bromance has
been replaced by hints of romance, underscoring a nerve-jangling chase that
builds to a climactic bloodbath.
Among
a bounty of sublime images, the opening shot sees Chui, smoking a Thai
cigarette, her back turned to the camera, with the neon glare of a Hong Kong
night throwing kaleidoscopic colour over the background. This tableau of
solitude echoes The Killer and its forefather,
the quintessential hit-man film, Le Samourai.
Colours drench the bustling, overcrowded streets. Even Hsiang’s blood spreading
through a bowl of water, after a bullet is extracted, looks mesmerising. In
contrast to the beauty there are many ghoulish images, not least the sight of
four crooked cops staring down at a potential informer, their faces distorted
against a transparent hospital curtain.
Villainy
is represented by the deceptively gentle-faced Charlie Chin as the crooked cop Lu.
His performance mounts with steady hysteria when Chui, originally on his
payroll, finds that her maternal instinct has been ignited by Hsiang’s daughter
and she helps Hsiang evade Lu’s minions, who have framed him for murder. With
far more than a passing resemblance to Heroic Bloodshed’s greatest actor, Chow
Yun Fat, Chin was most often seen in comedic roles such as the barmy Lucky Stars series. While Biao and Pat
Ha’s portrayals are unusually moderated and internalised, Chin shows no such
restraint. This being Hong Kong cinema, subtlety is a rare commodity. As with
many of the characters, his actions – dealing huge quantities of heroin – are
motivated by a desire to get out of town; this wish is shared by Hsiang, who
begins the film pleading with his estranged wife to hold off their divorce so
that he can emigrate to Canada with her.
The
momentum of the noir plot accelerates for some superlative action sequences. Tension
is built up to a precisely edited shooting spree as Hsiang and Chui, pursued by
Lu’s gunmen, make good their escape from a boarding house. The settling of
accounts in Lu’s luxury apartment favours an atypical genre ending. In place of
the usual bullet ballet there are amputations, knives and scissors are
employed, as well as guns and fists, the violence cranked up to unpalatable extremes;
its effect is not to satisfy but to repel, an altogether more philosophical
take on revenge than practised by other examples of the genre.
In
his cumbersome mackintosh, Biao exhibits little of the lightning speed that made
him and fellow ‘Little Fortunes’ Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung arguably the finest
action stars of the decade. Nevertheless this is a gruelling test of his
physical abilities: in just one scene, he falls into the path of oncoming
traffic and utilises a bamboo scaffolding pole to vault onto a street lamp. For
good measure – and audience applause – one of his signature back-kicks knocks
the wind out of one of Lu’s heavies. Skilled though he clearly is, the
vulnerability Biao shows in this production is an anomaly in a local film
industry that depicts fighting supermen, with no apparent Achilles’ heels, as
the norm.
An
on-screen coda adding further despair to the nihilism harks back to the ‘crime/violence
doesn’t pay’ constraints of the Hays Code. Despite this superfluous measure, On the Run is among the few masterworks
of a highly influential and rich period in Asian cinema.
Clark Hodgkiss
No comments:
Post a Comment