The action films of Hong Kong director Ringo Lam are gritty, cynical, and full of moments of brutality more punishing than most anything to come out of Hollywood. No wonder Quentin Tarantino—whose Reservoir Dogs borrows themes and imagery from Lam’s breakthrough film, City on Fire (1987)—is a fan. Lam isn’t as well known as his fellow Hong Kong New Wave directors John Woo (A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head) and Tsui Hark (Peking Opera Blues, Once Upon a Time in China), but he nonetheless directed a couple of major hits that helped redefine the national action cinema: City and its immediate follow-up Prison on Fire (1987). Wild City, currently playing at the River East 21, is his first feature in 12 years (though he codirected 2007’s Triangle with Hark and Johnnie To). That’s relatively big news for fans of Hong Kong auteur movies—and who knew there were so many of them in Chicago? When I went to see it in the early afternoon on Saturday, the next two shows were already sold out.
The conflict of Wild City—which finds Taiwanese and Hong Kong characters in a desperate struggle for mainland Chinese money—suggests an allegory about getting by in Hong Kong in the era of China’s ascendancy as an economic powerhouse. “Most experienced [Hong Kong] filmmakers and crew members have moved and work in mainland China now—they’re out of Hong Kong,” Lam told Fukazawa, noting that Hong Kong movies are having a harder time competing with those from mainland China. This despair comes through in a scene of Wild City when one of the Taiwanese hoods laments that he’s been so busy tracing people all over Asia that he hasn’t been able to return to Taiwan in years—one of his colleagues retorts that working people have no choice but to go where the money leads them. And so, the film shows the characters doing exactly that, losing their humanity as they run and fight for survival.
