There’s no better way to kick-off the holiday season than with Ringo Lam’s City On Fire (1987). This Hong Kong crime thriller is one of the most influential films of its kind and served as the basis for Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992). It was this film, along with John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), that established Chow Yun-fat as the epitome of cool.
Chow Yun-fat’s portrayal of the morally conflicted undercover policeman Ko Chow is one of the finest performances of the actor’s career. When Ringo Lam first introduces the viewer to Ko Chow it’s all classic Chow Yun-fat charm and clowning. But as Ko Chow becomes immersed in the world of a gang of jewel thieves and is drawn into the orbit of Fu (Danny Lee) the audience begins to see Ko Chow deteriorate. Chow Yun-fat’s winning smile and boyish exuberance gives way to a sweaty, paranoid mania. It’s a tour de force bit of acting and unlike any of Chow Yun-fat’s other roles.
Unlike John Woo’s more famous films, Ringo Lam prefers a pessimistic approach to heroism where redemption comes with acts of self destruction. It is in this way that Ko Chow represents the pinnacle of the Ringo Lam hero. These are characters who can only find self-reflection and the internal peace it affords in the moments before their doom. In this case Ko Chow confesses his identity to Fu only after being fatally shot and with the cops surrounding them, blasting through the walls with machine guns. It’s an erotically charged moment of romantic connectivity that is as brief as a gunshot.
City On Fire, like so many of Ringo Lam’s films of this period, renders acts of violence viscerally. The gun fight ballets of the Heroic Bloodshed genre are transformed in to arduous spectacles of endurance and self-flagellation. To maim, wound, or disfigure is a grotesque, inhuman spectacle that peppers the visual complex of City On Fire. This roots Lam’s sensibilities regarding action-violence in the tradition of Arthur Penn, Don Siegel, and Sam Fuller whose unromantic views of masculine bravura were all but unknown in the wuxia genre where so many Hong Kong directors specializing in crime films got their start.
City On Fire not only concludes Christmas but addresses issues of self-reckoning and forgiveness that are thematically inherent to the western holiday season. City On Fire isn’t a popular holiday movie in the U.S. but it should be. It’s one of those unorthodox Christmas films that, by virtue of its genre, avoids the sentimentality that obscures or simply suffocates the best known films of this ilk. A good Christmas movie should address the moral and spiritual themes of the holiday frankly and City On Fire does this well.
