Tragic Hero - Grand Guignol All The Way

Jul

10

Tragic Hero - Grand Guignol All The Way

≡ Category: Bullet Ballet, Drama, Essential, Hong Kong, Movie Reviews By Country |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Drama/Bullet Ballet
Director: Taylor Wong
Year: 1987

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

Since Tragic Hero is a continuation of the story begun in Rich and Famous, the filmmakers are kind enough to start the film with some flashbacks to get us up to speed. They’re kind of confusing, but the flashbacks succed in getting across the major plot points.

Back in the 70s, Li Ah Chai (Chow Yun Fat) was the undisputed triad boss in Hong Kong. His two lieutenants were the brothers Kwok (Andy Lau) and Yung (Alex Man). When Yung betrays Li Ah Chai, he gets a bullet in the hand for his trouble. Not wanting to cross his brother Yung, Kwok leaves Hong Kong for Malaysia, where he marries, has a kid and opens a restaurant. The main point is, there’s bad blood between Li Ah Chai and Yung. That’s all you really need to know going in.

As Tragic Hero begins, it’s the 80s and Li Ah Chai is married and has a son. To protect his wife and daughter, Li Ah Chai has done his best to keep the peace with Yung, who’s now working for a rival gang headed up by Boss Chu (O Chun-Hung). Li Ah Chai has also been busy converting his criminal holdings to legitimate businesses, ultimately to provide an inheritance for his son.

But Yung just won’t leave well enough alone. He’s constantly scheming to bring down Li Ah Chai and the net draws tighter and tighter. Considering how psychotic Yung is, he’s actually rather clever about how he goes about destabalizing Li Ah Chai’s criminal empire. His strategies are one of the pleasures of Tragic Hero.

Li Ah Chai’s reluctance to directly engage Yung mystifies his current lieutenants Big Eyes (Lam Chung) and Number Six (the invaluable character actor Shing Fui-On), and it becomes an open question whether Li Ah Chai will be able to retain their loyalty. Will he ever be ever to get Yung off his back?

Chow Yun Fat is terrific here as the upright gangland boss Li Ah Chai, showing the full breadth of his charm. Alex Man is wonderfully psychotic as the scheming Yung. The usual compliment of charismatic Hong Kong character actors are on hand to liven up the proceedings, including Peter Yang as Uncle Chi, Ng Hoi-Tin as the corrupt Inspector Hou, and the already mentioned Lam Chung and Shing Fui-On.

Action director Bruce Leung really earns his paycheck on this one. There’s a dilly of a sequence where a crooked cop intends to fake an escape attempt by Li Ah Chai so as to murder him on the orders of Yung. After he’s shot a couple of times, Li Ah Chai attempts to evade a phalanx of heavily armed police officers surrounding his compound by leaping off a balcony, hitching a ride on the top of a minivan and hobbling to a speedboat. The sequence is energetically directed and edited, even if it strains credulity. (Oh, let’s be honest. It stomps, slices and shreds it, but the outlandishness is part of the fun of Hong Kong action movies.)

The ending, reminiscent of the massive shootout at the end of A Better Tomorrow 2, is just as over the top and quite a lot of fun, featuring duel rocket launchers, mucho explosions, bodies flying through the air, and so many exploding squibs you’d almost think Tragic Hero was a Sam Peckinpah movie.

But I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. Tragic Hero, as you might surmise from the title, is hardly a carefree lark. Over the course of the film, our heroes endure a mounting series of setbacks and outright tragedies, to the point that revenge can’t possibly balance the karmic scales, but what the heck, they get an A for effort.