fludd.org - Movie Review

After he has played a supporting role in John Woo's classic gunfight movie A Better Tomorrow, Chow Yun-Fat has been given the chance to play in this action flick directed by Ringo Lam. Unfortunately, the magnificent acting talent of Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee doesn't save the movie because of its apalling script. All in all, City on Fire is definitely not worth your time, in my opinion. As for the action scenes, they categorically don't come close to Chinese movie director John Woo's legendary creativity.

As it was said very explicitly in the introduction paragraph of this movie review, the problem with City on Fire is definitely its script. Even though we can see that movie director Ringo Lam has had good intention while taking on this cinematographic project that can be easily forgotten, we almost want to puke because of the amateurism that was put behind the very clumsy storyline. Some people might say that City on Fire is not that bad at all, but one thing is sure, this movie could have been way better had it not been because of Ringo Lam's desire to create a uselessly twisted plot that only gets interesting at the end.

After you have read the last sentence of the previous paragraph, that should evidently give you a hint that City on Fire has a problem with its pace. There might be no doubt that there's something to understand from the story, but the problem with Lam's forgettable movie is that it has too many sub-plots. Some of these sub-plots don't add any dramatic interest to the movie, because they give us the feeling that the movie doesn't advance at all in a narrative manner. Indeed, during most of the running time, City on Fire goes in all kinds of direction that gives us the envy to fall asleep. The problem with the script is that it doesn't go straight to the point. Unfortunately, this will only be done when the end is coming.

Besides having a very clumsy script, City on Fire doesn't leave any rooms for psychological development. The only characters who can claim the right to be considered as psychologically multi-facetted protagonists are, without a moment of doubt, the characters played by Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee. All in all, the problem with City on Fire is that most of its characters are one-dimensional, which makes them very hard to appreciate.

Despite the fact that most characters are quite hard to appreciate due to the visible lack of psychological development, a few of these actors manage to impress us with an impeccable performance. These actors are Chow Yun-Fat (Hong Kong 1941), as Ko Chow (the undercover cop), and Danny Lee, as Fu (the thief who will become Ko Chow's friend). There's definitely a good chemistry between these two actors who succeed into exploiting the theme of honour, friendship and loyalty with their determination to bring depth to their respective character. Needless to say that the themes that were previously mentionned were all used to death in most of Hong Kong's action movies.

Finally, to be very honest with you, even though many people on the International Movie Database did like this action movie starring Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee, I, on the other hand, didn't really like this movie. Seriously, I just can't wait to return this forgettable Hong Kong movie to my local video renting club...

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