Island Of Fire - Prison Potluck

Jun

9

Island Of Fire - Prison Potluck

≡ Category: Action, Drama, Martial Arts, Recommended, Taiwan |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Taiwan
Genre: Drama/ Action/ Martial Arts
Director: Chu Yen-Ping
Year: 1990

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

There’s no doubt about it. Island of Fire is a complete mess, a Frankenstein monster stitched together from mismatching parts: a dollop of Le Femme Nikita here, a truckload of Cool Hand Luke there, a little Bad Boys here, even a smidgen of The Wild Geese…screenwriters Foo Laap and Yip Wan-Chiu are absolutely shameless in their wholesale theft. Worse yet, their stealing is to no particular purpose.

Island of Fire barely holds together. It’s just a bunch of barely connected episodes, one after the other.

Andy (”big” Tony Leung Ka-Fai) goes undercover into prison in order to investigate possible criminal activities by someone in the prison system, but only a small number of incidents in the film directly concern him. Equal time is given to Jackie Chan (Steve), Sammo Hung (John), and Andy Lau (Boss Lee). We get to see how Steve and Andy ended up in the hoosegow. Steve accidentally kills Boss Lee’s little brother and Boss Lee beats up a cop so he’ll be sent to the same jail Steve is serving his time at. We never learn why John is in the joint. Just that he misses his son and will do almost anything to escape (Sammo gets to reenact most of the Cool Hand Luke references).

Island of Fire plays like an exercise in randomity: none of the plot threads have anything to do with one another. When the screenwriters finally brought the four lead actors together in the third act, I laughed out loud at the clumsiness of their sleight of hand.

And yet…you can’t dismiss Island of Fire completely. It’s true that the screenwriters steal most of their ideas from better movies, but at least they have the wit to steal inspired scenes from deathless classics. Those scenes are entertaining, even rehashed.

All the proceedings are energetically directed by Chu Yen-Ping (A Home Too Far). It wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t given a coherent or original screenplay to direct. You can’t really fault the actors either: Tony Leung, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Andy Lau, and O Chun-Hung all give charismatic performances. The action choreography by Lam Man-Cheung is stellar, too. Even the cinematography by Chan Wing-Shu and Yip Chun-Wing looks great.

So, what’s the verdict? Scene for scene, Island of Fire is pretty darned entertaining, but it’s almost comical how pointless and arbitrary it is. I dunno. I’d have to give fans of the actors and the Golden Age of Hong Kong a cautious recommendation.

Don’t get me wrong. Island of Fire is definitely not a good movie, but there’s a lot of amusing bits and action strewn through the film. And besides, where else are you going to see four huge Hong Kong movie stars this badly misused in one place? For me, that’s worth a watch just out of curiosity value.