Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Action/ Comedy/ Drama/ Romance
Director: Norman Law
Year: 1988
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Walk On Fire is an usually understated cop drama for the Golden Age of Hong Kong (1985-1995). There is some gunplay, but it’s fairly restrained and standard. There are no outrageous stunts. The car stunts are standard. The direction by Norman Law is vigorous, but nothing special. There is very little of the hard-edged fight choreography that you would expect from an action choreographer like Tony Leung Siu-Hung: a little at the very beginning of the movie, and a sweet but relatively short knock down drag out between Andy Lau and the great Dick Wei.
At first, Walk On Fire seems to be utterly routine, and a bit of a snooze. How often have you seen this plot in a Hong Kong cop drama? A cop transfers a prisoner to another location. The crook’s buddies ambush the transport. There’s gunplay and eventually, the cop recaptures the bad guys, killing a few of them. One of the bad guys’ brothers gets revenge by killing the cop. The cops’ buddies vow revenge. You can’t get much more formulaic than that.
But then Walk On Fire surprises you by changing moods and becoming steadily better.
Structurally, the film Walk On Fire most reminds me of is the Harrison Ford vehicle, Witness. Like Witness, Walk On Fire starts off with some action, followed by an 2nd act which is almost entirely character based, and then ends with action.
The central hour of Walk On Fire contains almost no action whatsoever. It’s all comedy and drama. Usually, that’s a recipe for disaster in a Hong Kong flick, but Walk On Fire has a decent script by Wong Kar-Wai (yes, that Wong Kar-Wai, the director of Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love), and some good supporting performances, especially by Cherie Chung. Chung plays a ball of trouble, Miss Chung, a bar girl, drug addict, and informant for Inspector Li (Ray Lui). The character of Miss Chung is very layered and complex. She’s low class, ashamed of her drug habit, but she does have her pride, and and she’s loyal to a fault. She’s a welter of contradictions, but Cherie Chung has no problem making sense of the character, mining a deep vein of humor in her manipulations and growth as a human being. As usual, Kent Cheng is amusing in his signature role of a lazy, cowardly, but fundamentally decent cop named Ma Da. Veteran character Lau Siu-Ming is wonderful as the politics playing police captain, Chan. Teddy Yip gets a lot of chuckles as a jeweler with a taste in younger women. As far as the acting is concerned, the weak link is Andy Lau, who really wasn’t a very strong actor at this point. When he is called upon to grieve, the results are borderline embarrassing. Fortunately, he is better at sincerity and romantic banter.
The commonality in all of these performances is that they play off of either office politics or general cultural attitudes in Hong Kong, and so they are fascinating, especially to an outsider like me.
As a bonus, the final showdown between Dick Wei and Andy Lau is genuinely exciting, with some brutal throws and kicks, as well as some dramatic reversals.
It’s funny, but the thing I take away from Walk On Fire is mostly Cherie Chung’s performance, which should have been nominated for a Golden Horse (the Hong Kong version of the Oscars).
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