Ringo Lam on Fire

That the word “fire” appears in not less than four titles of films directed by Ringo Lam isn’t merely a matter of branding—it’s indicative of the temperature of Lam’s inflamed, scorchingly impassioned action cinema; if you could somehow put a thermometer to these films, said thermometer would explode. And explode Lam’s films do—from the gun-fu Holy Grail that is City on Fire to the acrid adieu to the Fragrant Harbour that is Full Alert, one is hard-pressed to find another body of work so steeped in marrow-deep rage, a filmography of festering resentment, of zero-sum game rivalries, of lit-match-to-a-powderkeg climaxes. So forcefully and repeatedly do Lam’s films posit Hong Kong as a hell on earth, a city that devours its young, a place where the only thing worse than the present is the future, that the results, paradoxically, are something like love letters scrawled in blood. It’s gonna be a helluva hot summer!