For 11 years, veteran Hong Kong director Soi Cheang has oscillated between gritty crime thrill-ers and martial action, squeezing in the bloody confrontations of Limbo and SPL2 in between his wuxia-fantasy Monkey King series. In that con-text, the simplicity of his 2012 film Motorway seems downright quaint by compar-ison. Under 90 minutes sans credits, Motorway is a lean stripped-back car chase thriller that, at a glance, might seem to be a Hong Kong take on The Fast and the Furi-ous. Instead, highway patrol and bank robbers collide in a deliberately-paced film that constructs its chases from the influence of movies like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and Walter Hill’s The Driver. In other words: an anti-Fast & Furious driven by understated, small-scale, methodical chases rather than high-speed spectacle.
Exact and precise: those words describe the driving itself as much as they do the film. Early on, antagonist and wheelman Jiang Xin (Guo Xiaodong) evades police via cunning car maneuvers akin to the opening getaway of Refn’s film: driving inconspicuously to avoid detection for as long as possible, hiding into the shadows of an empty container to lose cops on his tail, per-forming painstaking technical techniques that leave pursuing rookie Chan Cheung (Shawn Yue) with his vehicle hopelessly jammed in an alley’s 90-degree turn. Ready-to-retire ex-highway squad veteran Lo Fung (Anthony Wong) becomes a mentor to Cheung, training him in precision driving maneuvers (also to settle a vengeful grudge, of course, because this is still a crime film) while Jiang and his crew plan their next heist. The car thrills aren’t just technical moves either; between outlaw meets ending in bullet-riddled mayhem and locked-down shots giving squealing drifts into an immersive white-knuckle sense of speed, Soi Cheang’s prowess for vis-ceral action loses none of its intensity when applied to tuner cars.
Produced by Johnnie To, the story of Cheung and Fung bears the striking lit atmosphere and sleek flair that often defined the output of To’s Milkyway company, but peel away the aesthetic and even the cars, and the marketing tagline of a “karate showdown on wheels” becomes im-pressively accurate. A Wild West showdown on wheels could apply to Motorway as well, with Nissans instead of horses and tire burnouts instead of quick draws, yet a kung fu template applies even more to the film. Wong’s old master takes on Yue‘s young overconfident student to defeat an evil rival, teaching him a challenging secret style that is the only way to counter their equally matched nemesis. The flowing weaponry of Shaw Brothers classics is re-placed by drifting chassis, but just like the swords and spears of wuxia, the cars act as exten-sions of limbs colliding in technical duels of skill. Save for a traditional final chase, Motorway’s car action is defined more by the action-reaction rhythm of the drivers than by the vehicles themselves, their hands and feet working pedals and wheels in response to their opponent doing the same; on the midnight streets and winding mountain roads of Hong Kong, the direction turns pursuits into balletic exchanges of vehicular attacks, feints, dodges and counters at squealing-rubber speeds. At one point, Jiang drifts his car to effectively kick a spike strip into his pursuers’ path, and the sequence is filled with all the grace and clarity of a kung fu move. Soi Cheang‘s prior film Accident offered a similarly heady blend of hitman suspense by way of Coppola’s paranoia thriller The Conversation, but fus-ing car-chase cop film and martial arts genre trappings in such a low-key fashion remains in-credibly distinct.
Motorway’s increasingly relentless pace keeps the set-pieces coming regularly, from city street escapes to chaotic gunfight, until culminating within the claustrophobic con-fines of a pitch-black parking garage. As head and brake lights slice through shadows, the unu-sual location for a car chase perfectly exemplifies the film’s cat-and-mouse thrills and its focus on the process of precision driving. As if to fully cement the kung fu parallels, the subsequent climax between student and rival has both men literally battering their cars into each other in a drift duel.
With Fast X coming soon, the restrained and economical qualities of Soi Cheang‘s Motorway remain a unique side-evolution of car chase action, one that eschews spectacle for the simple thrills of evasive close calls and vehicular mastery.
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