Taxi Hunter - Consumer Advocate Or Vigilante?

May

14

Taxi Hunter - Consumer Advocate Or Vigilante?

≡ Category: Action, Comedy, Essential, Hong Kong, Movie Reviews By Country |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/Comedy
Director: Herman Yau
Year: 1993

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

After enduring Gonin, a nonsensical gangster melodrama from Japan, I wanted to give myself a treat, and I knew I could count on Taxi Hunter, an early Herman Yau/Anthony Wong colloraboration, to lift my mood.

Anthony Wong stars as Ah Kin, a reasonable life insurance salesman who has had some really bad experiences with Hong Kong taxi drivers. In time, Ah Kin loses it completely and starts hunting them down, first making sure that they are the “black sheep,” as he puts it. Yu Rong-Guang plays Ah Kin’s buddy, Sergeant Yu Kai Chung, who happens to be assigned to the case.

Apparently, at the time Taxi Hunter was filmed, Hong Kong was rife with taxi drivers who would refuse to take fares if the passenger wasn’t going far enough, extort passengers, and in some cases, even rob or rape them. All of the scenarios in the screenplay involving vicious taxi drivers have the ring of truth.

But this isn’t a grim drama about a sociological phenomenon. Far from it. Director Herman Yau has pitched Taxi Hunter as a black farce. The filmmaking is crude, with awkward cuts. That could also describe the martial arts choreography by James Ha and the car stunts by Billy Pang. They’re slapdash, but effective. It’s all typical of the cheapo slash and burn jobs that came out by the truckload during Hong Kong’s Golden Age (1985-1995), but Taxi Hunter has a ton of energy. The melodrama is deliberately heightened to the point of absurdity, goosed along by melodramatic music.

Anthony Wong is a riot as the meek Ah Kin, who comes to enjoy hunting errant taxi drivers, although even when he is on the wildest rampage, Ah Kin is careful to avoid hurting civilians and “good” taxi drivers, going so far as to apologize to those people he has inconvenienced. One of the high points of Taxi Hunter occurs when Ah Kin goes to the hospital where a survivor of one of his attacks is recovering. Director Herman Yau subverts our expectations of the scene to hilarious effect.

Yu Rong-Guang is wonderful as the true blue cop who has to balance his friendship with Ah Kin with his duties as a policeman. As usual for Hong Kong movies from this era, Taxi Hunter is awash with juicy cameos from great character actors like Hau Woon-Ling, who plays a granny who witnesses one of the killings, not to mention all the guys who portray the scumbag taxi drivers.

But Taxi Hunter isn’t perfect. Herman Yau indulges in some really broad comedy with the character of Mak Si Gao (Ng Man-Tat), Sergeant Yu’s partner. Ng Man-Tat is a perfectly capable comic actor, but he’s forced to ham it up like he’s in a Stephen Chow nonsense comedy instead of a black farce.

But even that can’t stop wildman Anthony Wong from elevating Taxi Hunter to classic status with his brilliant comic performance.

Unfortunately, the only way Taxi Hunter is currently available is on VCD, with the English subtitles burned into the print. I suspect in fact that the manufacturers simply transferred a videotape to VCD. As with all VCDs, the quality is nowhere near as good as a DVD, but don’t let that stop you from seeing this film. The good news is that it won’t cost you much to check out the classic slice of Hong Kong kitsch. Taxi Hunter is available on HKflix.com for $7.95 brand new, as of this writing.