City on Fire

First rule of heroic bloodshed cinema: The hotter the sax the better the action. I’d kill to be able to pull off these styles.

Heaps of fun to be had in this ridiculous but reasonably tightly made cops and robbers action flick. It's completely anti-intellectual but goes down nicely with, in my case, cheap cider.

I'm glad it inspired Tarantino to make a better film.

The first half is rough and does a poor job communicating who the key players are, but once the movie hits its stride in the second half it's quite a ride, with the climax in particular being gloriously batshit. Watch this to see where Tarantino got all the best ideas in Reservoir Dogs from.

Plot could have been tighter, especially in the midsection, but it's effortlessly stylish, and pretty exciting when it tries to be.

A.K.A. The Drubbing of Dubbing

Well done HK police action with a few shootouts and chases, but grounded by Chow Yun Fat's conflicted undercover cop. It's a bit repetitive in the middle, and has typical conflicts that serve only to move things forward, but it works and the ending lifts it up a bit.

81.500

Wellmade action pieces. And yes, Reservoir Dogs owes it a lot.

Hey, pretty good. For those wondering, while the major plot beats were repeated in Reservoir Dogs, the films are otherwise quite dissimilar. That aside, it's a pretty archetypal crime drama - Hong Kong seems to have a thing for movies about cops and criminals straddling both sides of the law - with some particularly gritty action.

77.500

Probably would have liked this even more had I not watched the obnoxious dubbed version.

Good Movie

Tarantino, you son of a gun...

The film meanders in a way until its ending. It is definitely possible that Quentin Tarantino lifted the ideas from this film to create Reservoir Dogs, but Dogs does it way better.