Filmmaker Leo Fong had been acting in low-budget action films for roughly a decade before branching out into writing and directing. An accomplished martial artist, Fong’s films are characterized by their fight choreography rather than any of the narrative content. 24 Hours To Midnight (1985) is no exception in presenting a series of tried and true genre tropes and cliches with some decently staged action sequences peppered throughout.
24 Hours To Midnight finds the legendary Cynthia Rothrock early in her career as a movie star. While the plot may revolve around her character’s vendetta she hardly appears in the film. In fact Leo Fong simply recycled much of the footage he already had of Rothrock (by replaying shots over and over) after she left the production early. So the real focus of 24 Hours To Midnight is on the two police detectives, McQueen (Bernie Pock) and Jackson (Myra), investigating Rothrock’s one-woman war on ‘White Powder’ Chan’s (Stack Pierce) criminal organization.
There is no life in 24 Hours To Midnight when there’s no physical movement. In Fong’s hands acts of violence become the only unique and legitimate form of expression available to the characters in his micro-budget crime caper. This creates a kind of discordance between plot and action, saying and doing. Where the concerns of the characters and their various objectives are played out with a Brechtian sort of plasticity, the physical acts of “doing” are executed with a contrasting degree of sincerity and emotional investment. This transforms 24 Hours To Midnight, most likely inadvertently, into a study of the contrast between artifice and truth in the actors’ performances that essentially works to deconstruct the genre.
That isn’t to say that 24 Hours To Midnight is a hidden gem or anything. Objectively 24 Hours To Midnight is a mediocre film whose failings or limitations have made the film far more interesting than most low-budget films of this ilk. The huge success of 24 Hours To Midnight on videotape has far more to do with the superficial pleasures of the film than any quasi-intellectual interpretation of the picture’s aesthetic operations. 24 Hours To Midnight has some hilariously bad line readings, a little gratuitous nudity, and plenty of fight scenes to sustain any viewer’s interest.
