People’s Hero (1987) April 25, 2008
Posted by Cal in : Drama, 1980s films , trackbackDirector: Derek Yee Cast: Ti Lung; Tony Leung (Chiu-Wai); Ronald Wong; Tony Leung (Ka-Fai) Territory: Hong Kong Production Company: Long Shong Pictures Ltd
A pair of youths (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and Ronald Wong) plan to hold up a bank but lose their nerve at the last moment – only to have their hand forced by circumstance and have to carry their plan through after all. Their botched effort to steal the money begins a siege that career criminal Koo (Ti Lung) cannot afford. Koo intervenes and juggles the hostages, the would-be robbers, the police and his former girlfriend - who is imprisoned for a crime he himself is responsible for.
Right from the start, you know this is a little different from the usual Hong Kong action movie with its stark titles and dark, foreboding music. The reason only becomes clear quite late in the movie – this is not an action movie at all; rather People’s Hero is a taut dramatic piece that survives without ever having to throw in a few kung fu moves (even though, of course, Ti Lung is more than capable of such antics). It also avoids many pitfalls of Hong Kong movie plotting and pacing, and the story genuinely moves along at an excellent pace by introducing new elements and problems at precisely the right moment. By that, I mean that the story actually evolves in a remarkably realistic way (some logistical anomalies aside) and what you expect to happen invariably doesn’t happen.
The characters, aside from Ti Lung’s Koo, are introduced at the start, and they do seem horribly clichéd. Basically, the bank’s staff and customers are given a minute or two’s spotlight to give a slight insight to their character – there’s a bankrupt shopkeeper, a spoilt schoolgirl and her vacant mother, an obnoxious, arrogant young man, a rich businessman, etc. These tired old stereotypes (hardly a likeable one in the whole bunch) threaten to drag the film down a level or two but are not given the opportunity because the focus stays quite solidly on the two young robbers and Koo.
The theme of the film is that everyone is a victim, and this is nowhere more evident than in the two youths who are forced to steal to live. Ah Sai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is the older, more responsible of the two, while Boney (Ronald Wong – Hong Kong’s Peter Lorre!) is a hopeless liability prone to fits of epilepsy. Both are sympathetic characters, but pale when compared to Koo, who was hoping to skip the country before the robbers decided to rob the bank. Koo is plagued by demons from his cop-killing past and is heartbroken over his girlfriend’s imprisonment (we learn she was jailed for carrying his gun). His interaction with the hostages sets up the character as a practical, reasonable man to whom the hostages quickly like and cooperate with.
Obviously, the police are aware of what’s going on inside the bank, and Captain Chan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai – that’s right, both Tony Leungs for the price of one!) tries to foil the robbery. He has a personal grudge against Koo, and will stop at nothing to get him – dead or alive. This does make the moral message of the film (cops bad, robbers good) a little obvious, but things get more complicated when Koo is forced (once more, through practical necessity) to show why he’s such a wanted criminal, and, without going into too much detail as to spoil the film, the line becomes blurred again.
There’s a lot of talk about this being the Hong Kong Dog Day Afternoon (the IMDB has just one plot keyword for this film – “remake”), but let me tell you right now the similarities are superficial. People’s Hero stands quite nicely on its own merits, thank you very much. I’ve always like the kind of dramatic film that takes place over a relatively short space of time or has one location, and this is a little of both. The characters are memorable, the plot taut and lean (the film runs like a panther for its 82 minutes’ running time) and the whole thing bristles with freshness – even 21 years after it was made.
Unfortunately, the recent DVD edition from Mei-Ah ports the original subtitles – and they are pretty bad. I remember some of them from the first time I watched the movie over ten years ago, and it’s a terrible shame that someone couldn’t have cleaned them up for this release. Unintentionally funny subtitles are usually great, but in a dramatic piece like this, they are glaringly out of place and hampers the tension.
It’s unlikely we’ll see a proper release in the West, as there’s no real action to speak of and it probably isn’t “serious” enough to be classed as World Cinema (whatever that is) and that’s quite a loss. People’s Hero is a great little film with a fantastic performance by Ti Lung, who was really hitting his stride at this point in his career, and an early standout performance by “Little Tony”.
See it.
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