Ringo Lam Loses Van Damme, Gains Respect

Thinking he could fight and survive the Hollywood system that crippled countryman John Woo artistically on his first American feature Hard Target, writer-director Ringo Lam soon found himself miserable on the set of his own U.S. debut Maximum Risk. Powerless to battle a primadonna star and a distributor who would recut the film, Lam fled back to Hong Kong to make his own brand of personal, but visceral, films. Last year, for a fraction of the time and cost of his ill-fated Van Damme vehicle, Lam released a masterpiece: Full Alert.

If American cinema did indeed borrow from Lam's City On Fire with the creation of Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, then Lam evens the score by taking his inspiration from Michael Mann's Heat. Telling a similar, episodic crime drama of the rivalry and fraternity between cop and criminal, Full Alert is not quite an action yarn. Rather, it's a lot closer to a Sidney Lumet effort: gritty, uncompromisingly serious in stretches, and entirely possible. Whereas Woo's troubled men manifest their traumas through stylized gunplay, Lam's characters are rendered literally motionless (physically and emotionally) by having to take human lives in their respective "jobs" on both sides of the law. The film explodes into several breathtaking car chases and gunfights, but these outbursts of violence do not serve as mere escapist spectacle: here, there are real costs to drawing one's weapon. The antagonist of the piece, Kwan, almost blows his escape from a heist when he pauses to repeatedly fire into his partner's body (a man he's executed). Haunted Kwan can't move from the scene until he gets his former partner's eyes to stop staring.

Full Alert builds slowly, opening documentary-like with a series of haunting images: an apartment building's polluted water supply. Blood in a bath. A corpse floating in a rooftop reservoir. No-nonsense cop, Pao, soon discovers that Kwan (responsible for the body, an architect, in the apartment) is planning a major heist and quickly gets him imprisoned. Kwan's accomplices are still at large and go forwards with the score. Repeated interrogations bring Pao and Kwan together, ala DeNiro and Pacino, to a mutual admiration in which both men discover that they have much in common (esp. regarding the taking of a human life). Pao and Kwan do acknowledge, however, that the death of either one of them, or perhaps both of them, can be the only outcome of this relationship.

Kwan eventually escapes, and the elaborate heist of a racetrack "Safe Room" forms the climax of the film. When the victory bullet is finally fired in the climax, don't expect any Pavlovian applause from the peanut gallery. To paraphrase Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout: no one says "something cool first". The shot that closes the case will echo in the gunman's ears forever.

Performances are uniformly excellent, especially that of Lau Ching-Wan as "Pao". Looking a bit like a cross between Chow Yun Fat and Benicio Del Toro, Ching-Wan's world-weary cop totally transcends the familiarity of this genre staple ("My gun grows heavy", Pao tells his wife during a melancholy moonlit walk. "I have no more desire to shoot or be shot at"). The moments with Pao's wife and child are welcome breaks from the intensity of the story, and manage to illuminate the character's internal struggle without seeming as intrusive as the domestic scenes in Heat involving Diane Venora and Natalie Portman.

Full Alert was hailed by some Hong Kong critics as the Film Of The Year for 1997. Let's hope North American audiences can catch this one on legit theatrical release or video, instead of umpteen-generation bootleg.

- Maxx Renn