Lau Ching Wan (Mad Detective, The Longest Nite) and Francis Ng (The Bride With White Hair, 2000 AD) star in this superbly paced thriller from writer/director Ringo Lam (Full Contact, City On Fire)…
There’s always one, lurking there at the bottom of the pile. A great movie that’s been waiting patiently for you to get round to watching it. Often, one way or another, we never do. And that’s one of the reasons we’re starting this new series of Lost Classics, to rectify our mistakes.
Ringo Lam’s Full Alert is just that sort of movie. Watching it, it’s easy to see why – like so many of Lam’s films – it gets overlooked. The action keeps the emphasis on the real, rather than near superhuman, but with superbly understated performances by Ching Wan and Ng, this police driven thriller is comfortably a cut above most Hong Kong and American films.
When an architects body is found in a water tank, the police soon track down his killer, Mak Kwan (Francis Ng). Inspector Pao (Lau Ching Wan) soon establishes that this is part of a bigger heist that has yet to take place. A cat and mouse game between the two, with Pao trying to track down Mak’s partners on the outside, his brother and a Taiwanese gang, before they break him out and execute their robbery.
From their first face-off in the interrogation room, Ching Wan and Ng’s characters are perfectly pitched as equals. Lam’s script intelligently fills out their background, the ghosts of the past that haunt them, the wives and children they care about in the present. It’s a recurring element of Lam’s work, from City Of Fire – which became the more simplistic Reservoir Dogs – where he showed us how much Chow Yun-fat’s character could lose as an undercover cop, to the comic book roller coaster ride Full Contact, there’s always been a far more grounded, realistic edge the roles he creates.
Ching Wan and Ng reflect that in their portrayals, avoiding histrionics or overacting they stick closer to the reality of their situation. For Lam there is no black and white, absolute good and evil. Indeed, his City Of Fire pretty much defined the grey area of police work and the morals at play for all thrillers to follow since, from Tarantino to John Woo and Andrew Lau.
Yet if Lam avoids judgment of his characters, he values their lives above any other director. For him no life is lost comically or without consequence, and therefore without leaving a deep resonance on the piece. As such guns and their use always seem far more serious than in many of his peers films. Such use brings him more in line with Western themes, and, if anything, British and European films, rather than those of Hollywood.
Full Alert is well paced, moving quite naturally from scene to scenes rather than jumping. The tension builds nicely as the atmospheric film leads towards the inevitable confrontation between Ching Wan and Ng. The obvious reference material is Michael Mann’s Heat, with their roles echoing those of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino – yet if anything Lam makes something more interesting out of it. (A street shootout early on is particularly reminiscent of a similar scene in Heat.)
In many respects with extended scenes set in an interrogation room, and pitting of cop against suspect in a cat and mouse game, it’s easy to see the film as a precursor to Lam’s later, equally atmospheric near-horror The Victim. That time roles were reversed with Lau Ching Wan cast as suspect, Tony Leung Ka-Fai as police detective.
It seems somewhat appropriate to kick off our new series of ‘Lost classics’ with a Ringo Lam film. Despite a highly regarded catalogue of movies, the acclaim of other Hong Kong directors – such as peers Tsui Hark and John Woo – has eluded him. Yet his films have always held a greater complexity than either of those directors work, in a sense a far more European sensitivity that is so easily underrated. Indeed, you can’t help feel that Full Contact both made him on the international scene, and ruined him with regard to what both producers and audiences expected of him.
His attempts to crossover to Hollywood may never have gotten past the inevitable Jean-Claude Van Damme stage, yet you can’t help but feel his work in equally underrated in Hong Kong. Films like City On Fire and Wild Search helped define a much more grownup approach to storytelling in Hong Kong action films that laid the groundwork for films like Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs and Johnnie To and Wong Kar-fai’s Mad Detective.
With his recent collaboration in the film Triangle easily the most successful segment, the time has come to reappraise Lam’s work, and right here’s a good place to start.
DVD details
Distributor: MIA Video Entertainment Ltd (UK)
Originally released in 2000 this DVD edition from MIA, much like most of their releases, leaves a lot to be desired. It's a muddy print with quite a lot of defects, but even that won't detract you from how fab a film this is.
There are some extras: a trailer, a Ringo Lam filmography, and a few production stills.
Mind you, if you can still find this version now it's bound to be a bargain, so what the hell. Though it should be noted that a more recent Hong Kong DVD comes with a directors commentary (subtitled?) and an improved DTS and Dolby 5.1 soundtracks.
