A Fiery Family - Making a Molehill Out Of A Mountain

Mar

9

A Fiery Family - Making a Molehill Out Of A Mountain

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Hong Kong, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Drama/ Martial Arts
Director: Wilson Tong
Year: 1989

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

Why oh why isn’t A Fiery Family better? The plot elements are there. Koo (Norman Chu) has just gotten out of prison. While he was in stir, his younger brother Pang (Gwan Lai-Git) joined his old gang. Meanwhile, Koo’s sister (Che Ling) and brother-in-law (Gordon Liu) are neck deep in debt on their factory. If that isn’t a recipe for trouble, nothing is.

Of course, the dai los are worthless scum, played with relish by the great Lo Lieh and Richard Cheung, doublecrossing our heroes left and right.

With a cast and setup like that, how can you lose?

Let us count the ways.

The picture starts off with a bang. Koo, in order to pay his sister’s debts, accepts one last job from Kuen (Richard Cheung), but in reality, he’s being set up. In an evocative boathouse setting, we get a fight between Koo and hordes of henchmen, employing machetes, chainsaws and martial arts.

Without a whole lot of explanation, Koo and his brother Pang are payed to assassinate a barrister. When they succeed and show up for their final payment, once again the bosses would rather kill them than pay. (You gotta love that philosophy.)

For the first thirty minutes, we have little idea what’s going on, but that’s okay. The fights and betrayals are entertaining enough.

But then we get a flashback that lasts for at least half an hour, showing how we got to this point. It stops the movie dead. If you’re going to play tricks with time and chronology, you’d better be damned good at it, and screenwriter Bryan Chang and director/fight choreographer/producer Wilson Tong are emphatically not good at their jobs. Over and over again, Chang gives us clumsy and pointless dialog which drags. (To make matters worse, Gordon Liu’s attempts at deep emotion are embarrassing.)

The movie gets worse at it goes along. At one point, when our heroes are in a van, some henchmen empty a couple hundred rounds of bullets into it. Our heroes duck and somehow aren’t killed instantly. Somehow, the van still is drivable. Oh, come on. Later, after the van blows us, the pursuing baddies, instead of mopping up, turn around and go home. Duh. At least our heroes sustain a couple of casualties.

Finally, the survivors go up against dozens of machine gun wielding henchmen and kill them all. The end.

This sort of thing can be fun, but not if viewers are treated like absolute morons.

Besides, the action, although there is a fair amount of it, just isn’t up to the late 80s Hong Kong standard (at least after the boffo opening sequences). For that you can blame director/martial arts choreographer/producer Wilson Tong. For that matter, you can blame the whole sorry mess on him.

This movie is only for people who are Norman Chu/Gordon Liu/Golden Age of Hong Kong completists. See A Fiery Family if you want to know how to take a great cast and decent premise and make a boring and pointless flick.