The Big Heat

A fierce and fatalistic Hong Kong policier. As produced by Tsui Hark and co-directed by the great Johnny To, this gore-drenched neo noir is as far removed from a John Woo bullet ballet as possible. Unlike Woo's romantic notions of honor and loyalty in a morally bankrupt world, the vision here is bleaker, more unsparing. There are no beautifully choreographed dances of deaths, no heroic displays of bloodshed and brotherhood. The filmmakers pummel our violence-jaded sensibilities, rubbing our noses in the sundry ways a human being can be physically mangled or emotionally savaged. They're determined to make us feel the pain, and they succeed in spades. This one fricken hurts to watch.

The film is a Hong Kong travel agent's worst nightmare, a portrait of the city as a neon-lit charnel house. The protagonist is a stolid, world-weary police detective (Waise Lee), whose nerve-impaired shooting hand serves as the perfect symbol of this pitiless urban jungle-- it's beyond repair, as out of control as the landscape he inhabits. In a rare star turn, Lee (the memorable villain of Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" and "Bullet in the Head") is coolly persuasive at suggesting bottled torment; he makes reticence seem like a powerful emotion.

The crime story involving the pursuit of a Malaysian drug cartel is routine stuff, as is the inclusion of a clumsy rookie cop assigned as partner to Lee. But Hark and To invest these familiar tropes with a profoundly unsettling despair that gets under your skin and stays there.

The Big Heat doesn't just burn -- it scalds.

If you aren't a fan of Cantonese gunplay/gangster movies, you won't like this as much as I did. If you are, however, and you haven't seen "The Big Heat", prepare to thoroughly enjoy yourself. Having been a fan of HK flicks for years, I've reached the stage where I feel like I've seen it all. I've even taken to renting videotapes at 4 bucks a pop, 2 tapes per film, at my local Chinese-language movie store(I live in Phoenix, AZ, so if you're anywhere remotely metropolitan, you probably have one in your town as well). Now, I scour the aisles, hoping to see something even remotely on par with the works of Woo, Lam, and Hark. Most times, I come up disappointed, sitting hopefully through a sluggish, poorly plotted film with one or two halfway decent action sequences. So I was pleasantly surprised by this one. An early entry into the HK cop action genre, this little number was directed by Johnny To and Andrew Kam, both of whom were reportedly fired by producer Tsui Hark, who helmed some of it himself. The story has been described by others here already, so I'll just mention that this thing kicks ass! It moves along at a fair clip, never gets dull, and the fight scenes, while more akin to Ringo Lam's close-quarters real-time shootouts than John Woo's orgiastic slo-mo duels, are consistently inventive and exciting. A couple of motifs here ended up in later films, like "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled". And, I swear, the "shoot the hostage" bit from "Speed" was lifted directly from this film. If you've watched all of the better-known HK movies(and some of the lesser-known ones), and are jonesing for a fix of Asian action, check this one out. And, yes, it really is gruesomely violent for a HK film.

This film, The Big Heat (Hong Kong, 1988) is outstanding, and it shows exactly what differs these movies from others. This is directed by Johnnie To and Andrew Kam and the story involves a little bunch of police officers (including Waise Lee, the smooth actor from Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head) who are on the trail of a criminal league which is also responsible for one of the cops' partner's death. What follows is non-stop action and never before seen cinematic mayhem.

I'm mostly attracted by the apocalyptic tone the film has. In many Hong Kong films from that period, the main theme is that what will happen to Hong Kong in 1997..? It is a subject matter that scares and really concerns people in these films. But the infernal visions of The Big Heat can also be seen universally and as a statement of the whole globe's future and attitudes which destroy it. The apocalyptic element is maintained by the action and gory mayhem, which never actually stops during the film. There are no chances to have a break and be in peace. The whole system is collapsing and everybody has to fight for life all the time or the "stronger will get you."

The action scenes and gun battles are incredible (sorry for using these adjectives so much). When I first saw this, I watched it on VHS tape, dubbed in English and fullscreen, but still that tape was uncut. When I first saw it, the film didn't have any particular effect on me, although one extremely brutal car scene stayed in my mind, but the film as a whole didn't "blow me away" back then. Then I purchased the DVD which is subtitled in English and letterboxed and after that second viewing, I was kicked in the head. This is the case usually with HK movies: they have to be seen many times, before you really can see through them and appreciate them. The Big Heat showed its real face for me during that second time and now I've ranked the film among the most outrageous, fast paced and also savagely violent action films ever. And I think that people with open minds will come to that conclusion too.

If we talk about the violence in HK films, the violent Woo movies are not too hard to take because they are so beautiful and full of more or less mysterious elements (white birds/doves, crushing statues, and so on..) but the violence in Big Heat is very different. It comes pretty close to violence in Ringo Lam's masterful Full Contact which is also pretty savage and not "beautifully" violent and symbolic as John Woo's films. I really love Woo's artistic work too, but the attitudes in his films are very different than Big Heat's.

A local collector has told me that he has tried to show Big Heat to some of his colleagues at work, and no one has managed to sit through it! That really tells something about what are chances for mainstream audiences to understand these kinds of films which DON'T intend to entertain stupid masses.

In its own masterful genre, The Big Heat is a 10 out of 10 points experience and it can be recommended only for fanatics of the challenging Far East cinema.

One of Johnnie To's earlier films, this tale is more akin to the hard crime thriller of Martin Scorsese rather than To's recent "tongue-in- cheek" style. What we have here is brutal storytelling of blackmail, espionage, corruption, and violence all facing one struggling Hong Kong detective. Even by today's standards the violence is both shocking and disturbing to see. Some sequences may be over the top, and while out of place they are vastly entertaining. The plot of "a washed-up cop pulled back in for one last job" had been done to death even back in 1988, however Johnnie To added in some twists plus heavy suspense to make the material fresh. In my opinion the faults are the editing and lack of charisma from Waise Lee's character. The protagonist could have been more likable to better engage the audience, and the editing is dated with some awkward cuts and sped up/slowed down moments which don't blend well with the drama. Other than that the material hit home with me, and the all-out conclusion left me in awe. Keep in mind this is filled with winding clues and bloody confrontations, not an easy watch. -7/10

...it's that the Hong Kong police are dangerously incompetent. Also, the tone of this movie is all over the place. In one moment a cop's fiancé is brutally murdered and a few seconds later another cop is running through the streets carrying a bomb like Adam West in The Batman Movie.