This is an 1992 John Woo film from Hong Kong action genre. To be honest, I’m not that familiar with the genre, and I’m not enough of a poseur to get into it to impress others. I will pick them up here and there when I can find them for a buck or two, but as I mentioned when I bought this film in February, that’s becoming rare as DVD prices are starting to creep up.
At any rate, the film deals with a police inspector, “Tequila,” played by Chow Yun-fat, who is working to take down a big gangster and arms dealer in the city. He encounters an up-and-coming hardman who is manipulated into killing his boss and joining up with another up-and-coming mob boss. This fellow, played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, turns out to be an undercover agent, and they work together to take down the arms dealer who hides his weapon cache in a hospital. Which leads to numerous almost cartoonish action sequences, although they were filmed with practical effects and not green-screened and then CGIed to death.
So it was an alright film, something I would expect to have seen on cable, and not a spectacle that it would have been in 1992 in Hong Kong, perhaps.
Speaking of spectacles, the film features a brief appearance by Hoi Shan-Lai as a librarian at the scene of a hit:
I am not sure of the actual translation, but I believe that is Mandarin for Velma.
She did not appear in many films, so I didn’t see many pictures of her on the Internet to make this a full beneath-the-fold feature.
ADDENDUM: I did not draw into stark relief something that I wanted to point out with this review: This film was produced in a free Hong Kong, and that might account for some of the thematic difference between this film and mainland Chinese and Hong Kong films after the handover–Kung Fu Yoga, Shanghai Knights (Hero, and Legend of the Fist come to mind. In this film, the bad guys are not Westerners trying to steal Chinese artifacts or treasure. This film has less propaganda in it and more universal themes where the protagonists and antagonists happen to be Chinese in extraction. I wonder if those kinds of films get made in China or Hong Kong today. They certainly haven’t hit the dollar DVD market in Springfield, Missouri, if they have.
It’s a fun movie. I just watched this on youtube today since I couldn’t find A Better Tomorrow streaming anywhere
On your own, or at my recommendation?
On my own. I didn’t see your post until after I’d watched it. I first saw it 25 years ago at least. There was a time I was really into John Woo/Chow Yun-Fat movies, and seeing John Wick 4 recently put me in the mood to see them again.
Dagnabbit. I briefly entertained the thought that I might be an Internet taste maker.
If it’s any consolation, there are other movies I’ve watched over the years after you mentioned them
Consolation? No: elation!