It would be easy to compare Benny Chan’s Raging Fire to Heat: an escalating collision between righteous cop and calculating criminal, a connection between them that transcends the law, a frantic gunfight in the streets. Yet that comparison seems more like one born of recency. For years before Michael Mann’s 1995 classic, the “heroic bloodshed” subgenre thrived in Hong Kong action cinema. John Wo’s masterpieces Hard Boiled (1992), The Killer (1989), and A Better Tomorrow (1986) are arguably the most known, towering over a wealth of ballistic spectacle. Ringo Lam’s grindhouse-flavored Full Contact, Yuen Woo-ping’s grisly gritty Tiger Cage, and Corey Yuen’s over-the-top action-drama She Shoots Straight are just a few of the flavors circulating during the subgenre’s peak. The late Benny Chan had been keeping the style alive in the 21st century through thrillers like Invisible Target and The White Storm. His final film follows suit with furious blistering aplomb, although its throwback action is a boon to a somewhat detached plot.
At its core, Chan’s latest — and sadly, last — indulges in the genre’s familiar trappings. There’s an elite police squad, led by Donnie Yen’s Cheung Sung-bong: a paragon of honest moral policing amid corruption and politics. A mysterious crew of professional criminals leave dead cops and rival crooks in their wake, their caper spree orchestrated by Nicholas Tse’s Yau Kong-ngo. What starts as a crisscross of police investigation and outlaw prep reveals a larger game of vengeance at play, as secrets and bitter history between the two leads erupt into epic violence on the streets of Hong Kong.
Tonally, Raging Fire is a tame far cry from genre entries such as Kirk Wong’s Organized Crime & Triad Bureau or more recently Johnnie To’s Drug War. Those were films where police were uncompromising ruthless authority, and the criminals managed to earn sympathy despite their viciousness. Perhaps that’s an unfair expectation given the nasty heights those films accomplish, but even some blurred lines and gray mortality could have intensified Raging Fire’s binary badges-vs-bad-guys dynamic. That dynamic only suffers more when the film halts for undeveloped cliché-ridden flashbacks of better days between Cheung and Yau. That said, Yen and Tse excel where it counts: the former a heroic dynamo, radiating stony rage and snapping off punches with a speed that belies his age; the latter, contrasting that stoicism with menacing scene-stealing swagger. The larger clash between police and criminals is serviceable enough to fuel the plot, but their relationship is an engaging chess-match of broken trust and cunning traps delivered through bombs, bullets and blows, oh my.
Whenever Raging Fire sags story-wise, its stunningly-choreographed action swoops in to melt faces off through bone-crunching intensity. An early three-way shootout pulverizes an abandoned mall (yet another potential callback to the genre’s heyday), as Chan weaves through the chaos with everything from frenetic GoPro shots to slo-mo long-takes. A shantytown arrest erupts into classic dual-fisted gunplay before becoming a frantic sprinting slugfest crashing through windows, roofs, sewers and beyond. A melee at motorcycle speed and a high-stakes bomb-collar showdown keep the set-pieces varied, in spite of jarring digital enhancements that lessen the impact of some stunts.
By the finale, Chan unleashes a bombastic guns-blazing chimera of Heat’s duffle-bag-hoisting heist and Den of Thieves’ mid-rush-hour mayhem, before smashing through a stained-glass window for a knife-v-baton inside a church. Those final dozen or so minutes are a culmination of Raging Fire’s thrilling strengths: an exhilarating duel of contrasting fight styles, weapons, and motivations; a grappling-heavy lightning barrage of strikes that leaves no piece of furniture unbroken.
In a time when Hong Kong’s fierce filmic style seems destined to remain a nostalgic memory, Raging Fire is a refreshing reminder of what was arguably action cinema’s most electrifying era. Perhaps it’s even more than that — a final celebratory tribute to that era, by a late master of the form.
The post Raging Fire appeared first on Spectrum Culture.