Thoughts from the committee
A cult classic, Ringo Lam’s City on Fire is a leading entry in Hong Kong’s heroic bloodshed genre, which ruled the neon-soaked late 80s world and produced some of the best action films ever made, until its leading lights – Lam and John Woo – were lured to Hollywood to smash out Face/Off, Broken Arrow and several ultraviolent direct-to-video showcases for Jean-Claude Van Damme.
A band of gangsters knock off a high-end jeweller and fight both their suspicions that there is an undercover cop in their midst, as well as the uniformed cops tracking them into several epic and bloody skirmishes, in a story in turn knocked off by Quentin Tarantino in Reservoir Dogs. Starring a fresh-faced Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee, City on Fire has all the hallmarks of a HK actioner, many of which became tropes of American films of the early 90s – violent and operatic action sequences, slow motion, double-fisted handguns, dreamy saxophone interludes and (in a touch not picked up by Hollywood) studio post-dub of all the dialogue.
Unavailable in a decent print for years, this 4K restoration showcases one of the grittier entries in the canon.
“Chow’s work in John Woo’s operatically flashy action movies such as A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled put this era of late-80s and early-90s Hong Kong cinema on the global map, but this is a more brutal and realistic kind of movie, full of grubby locations, tough choices and sudden deaths as well as some thrilling foot chases and shootouts.” – Steve Rose, The Guardian