Firestorm

An explosive Hong Kong crime thriller with intense action scenes.

In Hong Kong a team of well-armed criminals have been pulling off violent daytime heists. They’re led by Cao, a criminal mastermind who never leaves any evidence or traces to himself – legally he’s untouchable. This is the cause of much stress for senior inspector Lui (Andy Lau), who is horrified by the increasing body count of innocent bystanders and police officers. He wants to bring Cao and his team down so no more innocent lives are lost, something he’s finding difficult – Cao’s team is violent and capable, and the law prevents him from just arresting Cao and his men without clear evidence.

As a typhoon begins to close in on Hong Kong, two men are released from prison simultaneously. Bong is a criminal who promises his girlfriend he’s going to go straight, but teams up with Cao for more heists. Tong is an undercover agent and best friends with Lui, who is the godfather to Tong’s mentally disabled daughter. Bong aids Cao’s heists, acting as a foil to Lui’s efforts – the two were rivals as children in school judo classes – but straining his tender relationship with his girlfriend. Tong is willing to go undercover in Cao’s gang, which puts himself and his family in danger. Lui struggles as he tries to handle both men in his pursuit of Cao.

As Cao’s gang wreaks more havoc and costs more innocent lives, Lui’s determination to bring them to justice becomes darker. Wanting to put an end to the slew of deaths the gang leaves in its wake, Lui becomes willing to do anything, even if it means breaking the law.

 

It is, all things considered, a pretty great action thriller. The plot works for what it is, pretty standard crime thriller fare, but it does just enough to keep it interesting. While some aspects are a bit ho-hum (Bong’s relationship with his girlfriend is nothing special and seems to just be crime film box-checking), it’s keeps things exciting. Otherwise the movie keeps a taut pace and the performances are pretty great. It’s also a good looking movie, everything looking really slick and stylish.

Towards the end Lui has almost become a villain himself as he starts making morally questionable decisions to get Cao and his men. The way it happens is pretty natural actually – his frustration and fury builds and builds and, once it boils over, his actions get rough. After that he starts finding it easier to make similar decisions, getting more aggressive each time. By the finale Lui pretty much goes kill crazy, doing everything he can to make sure Cao’s gang doesn’t get out alive. He becomes like a criminal mastermind himself.

This movie is ridiculously action packed, to the point of putting most other crime thrillers to shame. Gunfights with machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers are plentiful, with surprising brutality. There are car chases, intense raids and even the heists feel intense. There’s even a ridiculous-yet-awesome fistfight on a rickety mesh gate hanging over a several story drop.

Collateral damage is a big part of the movie, with dozens civilians and police officers getting gunned down, an obscene number of cars being totalled or exploded and, for the finale, what seems to be an entire street, including a bridge, being completely demolished. It’s all pretty damn impressive too. The explosions are big and ridiculous (though some use unconvincing CGI), the guns are the same and the action gets surprisingly brutal (you don’t really expect to see people with split limbs during gunfights).

It's a pretty great movie all things considered. It might not have the most complex of plots, but it delivers on the action front and remains compelling throughout.  

Dead Silence

Ventriloquist dolls are creepy, right? That’s essentially the entire concept behind Dead Silence, a horror film directed by James Wan. Those familiar with the horror scene should know Wan by name - he hit it big as the director and co-writer of the original Saw, and produced the rest of the series. While the Saw films might be considered passé at this point (Paranormal Activity-styled found footage flicks seem to be the more popular trend these days) at the time the series completely changed the landscape for horror filmmaking by popularising the torture porn genre.

More recently Wan hit it real big (both commercially and critically) with two horror hits, Insidious and The Conjuring, which betrayed Wan’s true passion and skill – building creepy atmosphere and tension in haunted house movies. And he’s really good at it too – Insidious and The Conjuring are both great haunted house movies. But before those films, in the tender refractory period after the explosive success of Saw, Wan weakly pumped out two films – Dead Silence and Death Sentence. The latter film is an alright and mostly overlooked revenge thriller where Kevin Bacon hunts down and massacres the men who killed his son. But today we’re talking about the former.

Dead Silence is an oddity, and feels like an odd misstep for a breakout director unsure of where to go. It also shows a director trying new things – the ideas and filmmaking here are almost completely the opposite with what was seen in Saw. It’s the early inklings of a director trying new things and shaking out the bad ideas - this was the groundwork that lead to Insidious and The Conjuring being so good. As such, the film itself is not great. There are some decent ideas, but the execution isn't quite up to snuff. It’s a movie that doesn’t have anything under the creepy surface. It’s hollow, much like the dolls it concerns itself with. It also happens to be a massive rip-off of Freddy Kreuger and his entire backstory from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

 

Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten), living happily with his loving young wife, mysteriously receives a ventriloquist doll in a package delivered to his house, sent from his home town of Ravens Fair. By the end of the evening his wife is found dead with her tongue torn out. The police think Jamie is responsible, but due to a lack of evidence they can’t arrest him. Jamie, shocked and horrified by the death, finds out that the doll belonged to infamous, long-dead ventriloquist Mary Shaw, also hailing from Ravens Fair.

So Jamie returns to Ravens Fair to bury his wife and find out who sent him the doll – he believes the culprit must be the killer. His investigation leads him to look into the legend of Mary Shaw; famed for her talent, she had a collection of over a hundred puppets and was obsessed with creating a ‘perfect doll’. When a local boy went missing, the townsfolk accused and killed Mary, who – as stipulated in her will – was then turned into a ventriloquist doll herself and buried along with the rest of her dolls. As Jamie begins to look into the grisly truth behind Mary Shaw, he’s pursued by Lipton, the detective who believes Jamie killed his own wife.

There’s not much else to say here since that’s basically the entire movie. A big fault with the film is the complete lack of meat or depth to the film. There is no real mystery there – once Jamie gets to Ravens Fair he pretty much instantly learns that Mary Shaw’s ghost is responsible. The rest of the movie is just delving into why the ghastly spectre is doing what she’s doing. The characters are all bland and lack anything interesting and even the investigation into Mary Shaw is mostly devoid of excitement or chills. It’s mostly all exposition until the end, where an encounter with Shaw’s ghost in her creepy abandoned theatre feels completely ridiculous and out of place.

The town of Ravens Fair feels like a half-formed idea – a sleepy town with aged, gothic architecture. The concept is tired, and though Mary Shaw’s dilapidated theatre is a fun location in theory it never feels solid. CGI trickery was used to pull off the size and scale of the place, but it all looks and feels fake. It’s not helped by confining a lot of the film in drab locales – we keep returning to a seedy motel room and a mortician’s office. The film also feels empty in terms of people – Ravens Fair is a ghost town. It makes sense in terms of plot, but it’s baffling that there only seems to be four people total in the entire place.

This is a horror film with old school ‘rules’ to the horror. ‘Rules’ are a tough concept to nail – to work they need to be interesting, make sense within the story and absolutely never obstruct the pace or flow of the film. Some pull it off well (the original Nightmare on Elm Street’s dream-based rules for Freddy are pretty much perfect). Most films fail by having nonsense, inconsistent rules that seem conveniently made up on the spot (like in pretty much every Nightmare on Elm Street sequel). Dead Silence actually has pretty decent rules in concept, but it never capitalises on them leading to many missed horror opportunities.

When Mary Shaw appears, all other sounds cease – its dead silence as the title suggests. It’s honestly a unique, cinematic idea but the film doesn’t pull it off. For the most part you won’t actually notice the sudden turn to silence (though watching the film in a room full of people probably doesn’t help). The other big rule, that really doesn’t get much attention, is that Mary Shaw only kills you if you scream, at which point she rips your tongue out and steals your voice. This is a missed opportunity as they don’t use it for anything interesting. It’s not helped by the fact that there are only four deaths in the entire movie.

It’s all very much a ‘Freddy Krueger’ scenario, with the vengeful ghost of Mary Shaw slaughtering everyone related to those who killed her in revenge. She even has her own creepy (if not forced) children’s rhyme that details how she gets her victims. A common trend in Wan’s horror films is his odd obsession with dolls. There’s the doll mascot in the Saw films, the dolls here and even The Conjuring started with a scene that had nothing to do with the plot regarding a creepy, possibly haunted doll (an opening scene apparently so popular it spawned its own film, ‘Annabelle’).

Dead Silence is just a strange film in the state it’s in. Its ideas are decent, but underdeveloped, its atmosphere only half formed. The concepts are decent, but they just aren’t solid and their execution is lacking. It needed a stronger screenplay with more interesting characters and a stronger narrative. The frustrating part is that it’s not an awful film – on a technical viewpoint the film is quite well made, it’s just sadly lacking. Still, watching it you can see some of the seeds that would lead to Wan’s next big hit Insidious.

City Under Siege

As far as incorrectly descriptive, potentially misleading titles go, ‘City Under Siege’ might just take the cake. From the title you might assume it was some sort of gritty crime thriller or war film, and I’m sure you’d guess that there’d be some sort of city that would be under some sort of siege. Well you’d be wrong on all counts because ‘City Under Siege’ is actually about Circus Mutants. It’s a mostly light-hearted superhero action movie of sorts about a knife-throwing circus performer who gets super powers and has to fight off his evil, mutated co-workers. And it’s actually pretty fun.

 Sunny (Aaron Kwok) is a clown working for a circus troupe, but his real ambition is to be a knife thrower, a skill he claims to excel at but nobody believes him. This is mostly due to the bullying and objections of Chu (Collin Chou), the troupe’s popular, professional knife thrower. Chu, a charming performer, is actually a violent and cruel thug who, with some of his fellow performers, is determined to get rich and leave the circus. When they hear about a legendary horde of gold buried in a nearby mountain, Chu and his gang violently search for it, with the curious, innocent Sunny accidentally getting caught up in the search.

The search for the treasure goes awry when they accidentally release a noxious experimental gas from World War 2 that mutates the troupe into super-powered freaks.  While Chu and his followers become beastly mutants, Sunny retains his normal appearance but finds himself with super powered strength and senses. He soon meets ambitious news anchor Angel (Shu Qi), who initially disregards him and his story. When his super-powered nature becomes public, Angel sees an opportunity and has Sunny cash in on his sudden popularity through various product endorsements and publicity events.

Meanwhile Chu and his followers continue to mutate and go on a crime spree but become violently jealous of Sunny’s popularity and un-mutated appearance. They start to target Sunny and Angel, and it’s up to Sunny, and a duo of mutant-fighting government agents, to take Chu and the other mutants down.

 

It’s a fun, simple movie with decent action scenes. It’s often cartoonish in a superhero-ish way, with fight scenes that have characters jumping across the screen (thanks to wires) or throwing CGI knives at each other. Chu and the other mutants get more ridiculous as they mutate – it starts with dark veins, hair loss and mangled teeth and, by the end, they have swollen muscular arms and claws. It’s mostly light hearted, though it goes a little heavy at times (the whole ‘World War 2 toxic gas’ stuff is weird). It also goes through some of the expected scenes for a superhero type of film (like Sunny realising he has super sense, and a training montage before the final battle). The film also gets a little side tracked with some romance subplots.

There are two weird romance subplots. The two secret agents who are investigating the mutants have a doomed romance subplot that gets melodramatic fast, which is strange because we don’t really know much about them. Even stranger is the Sunny/Angel relationship – he’s hopelessly positive and well-meaning and she’s nice, but her actions can come across as a bit selfish and self-centred – she instantly starts cashing in on Sunny’s popularity by making the naïve, absent minded hero do product placements and TV spots for cash. It also feels more like a ‘friendship’ than a romantic relationship between the two – neither one seems to be in love with each other, they just become good friends. That doesn’t stop the movie from pushing the romance angle. Towards the end of the film a love song plays while flashbacks to scenes of the two together play. It’s exceptionally sappy.

It’s an entertaining movie and the performances are pretty decent, if a little simple. Aaron Kwok is sympathetic and likeable as Sunny. Collin Chou is weird in his villainous role, actually being comparatively mellow compared to his fellow mutants and developing a weird obsession with Angel. Shu Qi is an interesting case. She’s an actress that can lend herself to some great comedic moments with good timing and delivery (like in the beginning of Conquering the Demons) but, more often than not, she seems to do melodramatic roles where she weeps and usually gets killed tragically (…like at the end of Conquering the Demons). Here she does a little bit of both as Angel (she doesn’t die though – spoiler alert and whatever). It’s thoroughly important to note that Shu Qi started out doing nude modelling and softcore porn, so there are interesting photos of her available on the interwebz.

One issue I had was that my DVD copy is stuck in a horrible 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning that even on a large television the picture only appears in a small box in the centre of the screen. I despise aspect ratios like that. Also for some odd reason he subtitles appeared in both Chinese and English (my DVD is a PAL copy).

In the end I liked the movie. It's a little all over the place, and it takes some weird detours from your traditional superhero flick (the publicity train angle is really odd) but it's entertaining and fun. They really should have called it something other than 'City Under Siege' though.