There’s a “before 1986” and “after 1986” in Hong Kong action cinema, a sea change brought on guns-blazing via John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. The subgenre of “heroic bloodshed” didn’t start with that film; the seeds for its brotherly bonds and stylish gunplay could be traced back a decade-plus to the works of Chang Cheh and other contemporaries. But watch a Hong Kong crime thriller released in the wake of Woo’s classic, and the influence is often undeniable down to the dual guns, stylized chaos, and underworld melodrama. In that context, 1984’s Long Arm of the Law becomes even more refreshing. No melodramatic bond, no honorable anti-heroes, no heightened action: its raw, vicious, uncompromising outlaw saga towers as an epitome of pre-Better Tomorrow crime thrills.
The 1997 Handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China was over a decade away when Johnny Mak made his single directorial effort, but the anxiety is palpable in Long Arm of the Law. Its gang of Chinese mainland robbers – led by Shaw Brothers veteran Lam Wai – make a grueling border crossing into Hong Kong, lured by the promise of luxuries to enjoy and wealth to snatch. From the off, the plan seems cursed; one man doesn’t even survive the crossing, and the first attempt to rob a jewelry store leads to a chaotic escape through the city streets and a dead cop in their wake. Filmed with a guerrilla eye for ‘80s Hong Kong’s lavish excess, neon bustle, and grittiness – practically a time-capsule window into the era – the seductive capitalistic charms of McDonald’s and prostitutes are palpable when contrasted with the hardbitten criminals.
Much of Long Arm of the Law’s runtime resides in that gradual seduction, following the gang as they enjoy the pleasures and vices of Hong Kong, make tenuous allies, and prepare their next heist plans. The everything-that-can-go-wrong-does sense of doom never fades though, nor does the unromanticized bite that Mak brings to the ensemble. Their brotherhood is deeply felt but never becomes the operatic bond found in Woo’s films and their ilk. These are ruthless crooks unleashing reprisal with matter-of-fact just-business coldness, memorably splattering a body across an ice rink in one of the more visually striking shots. At every turn seems to await a dead end or more bad luck, to the point that this merciless gang can’t help but feel like sympathetic underdogs being kicked around by the even more ruthless goliath that is Hong Kong.
And for such desperate mainlanders, there is no dead end more oppressive than Kowloon Walled City. The labyrinthine enclave once housed around 50,000 residents within six acres of impossibly dense apartment buildings; unpoliced and ungoverned, it would be demolished only a few years after Long Arm of the Law was filmed, inadvertently turning the movie into a remarkable window into the notorious district. The shift in mood and atmosphere is not unlike entering a new level of Hell: from the neon streets and sprawling malls to an endless shadowy tangle of alleys, wiring, and stairways. Lam Wai and company enter the bowels of Kowloon Walled City to escape the manhunt on their tail but instead, their actions come across as that of prey running headlong into an even-tightening snare. As if Hong Kong itself has drawn its unprepared quarry into a gullet of concrete, pipes, and encroaching police shields to devour them. The ensuing rat-trap of a finale is a claustrophobic anxiety attack of frenetic chases and gunfight carnage so harrowing, suffocating, and reeking with cornered panic that the action acquires the hopeless dread of a horror film. Rats in a maze to the bitter end, a point that Mak makes hauntingly explicit by the time the credits roll.
Long Arm of the Law would get three unrelated “in-name-only” sequels, and both are unmistakably products of Woo’s influence on the genre. Part II may feature vicious criminal and brutality like rat-to-the-chest torture but gone is the unglamorous action, the you-are-here sense of gritty realism, the suffocating hopeless air of doom. And by the third film, characters are brawling through hallways full of goons and having gunfights while hanging from the side of a building. Johnny Mak only directed one film and, much like its unparalleled time capsule of Kowloon Walled City, Long Arm of the Law remains a distinct, savage, and thematically fascinating snapshot of an era in Hong Kong action cinema.
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