City on Fire 4K 1987

I love this film. While Americans were dreaming of combat sports and churning out action movies about tough Navy SEALs and reckless Chicago cops, Hong Kong was keeping up with the trend and preparing the groundwork for future American blockbusters and even masterpieces. One such film was Quentin Tarantino's magnificent “Reservoir Dogs,” which absorbed the essence of Kubrick, Peckinpah, and Ringo Lam's cult classic.

I adore Chow Yun-Fat. All those qualities that his film father John Woo highlights in almost every interview. He is like an angel with two pistols in his hands, he is like a god who descended from heaven to bring peace and tranquility to earth... but it's not as simple as it seems. His innocent, pure face was once filmed in cheap Chinese soap operas, and then the Wachowski brothers missed out on him, but in the late eighties, times were different. With Bollywood flair, he released ten films a year and began to seriously dream of a real movie factory, that is, Hollywood.

Ringo Lam is a remarkable filmmaker. But he also soon left for the United States and gradually became mired in the sticky Hollywood sludge, along with his collaborator Jean-Claude Van Damme, who, incidentally, sought considerable solace in Hong Kong cinema (both Lam and Tsui Hark), but unfortunately found nothing. But then Lam was still young, hadn't made Twin Dragons, so things weren't so bad for him.

So, this is the film that formed the basis for Goodbye, Dogs. The famous triangle in which Harvey Keitel, Lawrence Tierney, and Chris Penn, was borrowed from here, the only thing is that Tarantino made his own comedy film, and “City on Fire” remains a classic of the genre among Hong Kong productions, in particular, which was received with enthusiasm in America.
It is a crime thriller with strongly expressed dramatic moments, where the emotions and feelings of the characters are sometimes on the verge of a banal breakdown, but this is what distinguishes this film. And the sad ending, which emphasizes the gloomy and cold tone of this picture, cuts off the wings of the angel Fata. In principle, everything was heading towards this from the very beginning.

Ringo Lam came up with an excellent recipe for true gourmets, which was subsequently appreciated by many of us.