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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.
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