City On Fire

Widely acknowledged as the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Ringo Lam's terse gangland melodrama City On Fire shows this idiosyncratic action movie director at his darkest. Chow Yun Fat plays Ku, an undercover cop buried so deeply inside the Hong Kong criminal fraternity that he no longer knows which side of the law he's supposed to be on. Infiltrating a dangerous gang of armed jewel thieves, he wins the friendship and respect of Fu, a hard-bitten gunman played with steely reserve by Danny Lee. As Ku is increasingly estranged from the police and as Fu watches his fellow gangsters cracking under the strain of pulling off their biggest heist yet, Lam paints a grim portrait of desperate men losing control of their lives. Chow Yun Fat brings a genuinely rattled quality to his performance as a lone individual living on the last of his nerves, and Lam keeps tight control over the sense of menace as Fu, who casually accepts death as an occupational hazard, warily lets Ku into his life. A mordant sense of loss and disillusionment hangs over both characters, starkly offset by the twinkling Christmas lights festooning the streets in preparation for the holiday season... sets the mood for the film's bitterest moment: a brutal metal-shredding car chase accompanied by a tinny disco version of "Joy to the World". Other highpoints include the taut three-way standoff between a dead-eyed Fu and surviving gang members as they argue at gunpoint over Ku's loyalty, a scene Tarantino later reworked in Reservoir Dogs, and the heavy ballistics of the final shootout as the police surround and close in on the thieves' warehouse hideout. Like the man with the gun says: "Let's go to work." --Ken Hollings --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.