The Big Heat (1988)

Inspector Waipong Wong has to put his life and resignation from the Hong Kong police department on hold to investigate his former partner's mysterious murder. What he and his crack team of three other cops uncover is a plot far more sinister than they originally anticipated.

If you aren't a fan of Cantonese gunplay/gangster movies, you won't like this as much as I did. If you are, however, and you haven't seen "The Big Heat", prepare to thoroughly enjoy yourself. Having been a fan of HK flicks for years, I've reached the stage where I feel like I've seen it all. I've even taken to renting videotapes at 4 bucks a pop, 2 tapes per film, at my local Chinese-language movie store(I live in Phoenix, AZ, so if you're anywhere remotely metropolitan, you probably have one in your town as well). Now, I scour the aisles, hoping to see something even remotely on par with the works of Woo, Lam, and Hark. Most times, I come up disappointed, sitting hopefully through a sluggish, poorly plotted film with one or two halfway decent action sequences. So I was pleasantly surprised by this one. An early entry into the HK cop action genre, this little number was directed by Johnny To and Andrew Kam, both of whom were reportedly fired by producer Tsui Hark, who helmed some of it himself. The story has been described by others here already, so I'll just mention that this thing kicks ass! It moves along at a fair clip, never gets dull, and the fight scenes, while more akin to Ringo Lam's close-quarters real-time shootouts than John Woo's orgiastic slo-mo duels, are consistently inventive and exciting. A couple of motifs here ended up in later films, like "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled". And, I swear, the "shoot the hostage" bit from "Speed" was lifted directly from this film. If you've watched all of the better-known HK movies(and some of the lesser-known ones), and are jonesing for a fix of Asian action, check this one out. And, yes, it really is gruesomely violent for a HK film.