Director: Ringo Lam
Script:Ringo Lam & Sandy Shaw
Cast: Andy Lau, Rosamund Kwan, David Chiang, Victor Wong, Paul Chiang, Wu Chin Lin, Ng Choi Nam, John Chiang
Running time: 100.5 mins
Year: 1995
Certificate: 15
It’s Cambodia, in 1975, and eight-year old Wai Lok-yan has a really bad day when he firstly finds a dead body in a paddy field and then later witnesses his parents murdered by a previous ally of theirs, Ray Liu (Paul Chun). And then, to top things off, his younger sister dies in a house fire started by Liu’s men. Fortunately Yan’s Uncle Seung (John Chiang) turns up later for the funeral and whisks the understandably traumatised boy away to Thailand to live with him and his son.
The film then jumps forward 20 years and we can see that Yan has now grown up to be an air force pilot, albeit one who is something of a maverick, regularly disobeying orders. He goes further off into the ‘deep end’ when he reads a newspaper article which reveals that his parents’ killer is temporarily in the country, being celebrated as a successful businessman, even though that business is in arms dealing. It’s all too much for our hero and he decides to seek revenge and kill Ray. However, things don’t work out as planed and during the gala diner he misses his chance to kill his nemesis and instead his friend/step brother is taken prisoner, tortured and killed. Fortunately Yan’s helped by the lovely Mona (Rosamund Kwan), who is Ray Lui’s concubine and general sex slave, to hide and escape.
Yan ends up deciding to get his vengeance by working with the CIA, who his dad and Ray used to work for/with many years before. They set Yan up to become a gang leader in Hong Kong, which enables him to rescue Ray’s daughter, Crystal (Jacklyn Wu), from a kidnap situation. The two later marry, which enables Yan to get closer to Ray, ready to enact his revenge. However, Mona is jealous of Crystal and tries to rekindle her brief romantic dalliance with Yan, but her plan is interrupted by Crystal turning up, leading to Ray’s daughter being hospitalised after Mona attacks her. Eventually, Yan is told he needs to travel back to Cambodia, with Ray, to meet up with a drug lord who buys weapons from Ray, setting the scene for him to get even with Ray, once and for all… or at least that’s the plan.
The Adventurers was director Ringo Lam’s last film he made in Hong Kong before he left China to seek his fortune in the United States, where he made Maximum Risk with Jean Claude Van Damme. And one can see that he was already being influenced by Hollywood movies in The Adventurers, a film with many western motifs, including some from the Neo Noir subgenre.
Apparently Lam and his principal star, Andy Lau, didn’t see eye to eye while making the film, and they never worked with each other again, although both had very successful careers subsequently. And, unfortunately, the film’s production was plagued by problems: the original director was dropped, as was the original scriptwriter, and there were problems with locations, triads, and the shoot suffered from several tropical storms too. In fact, the film took a year to complete.
However, all things considered, the film didn’t turn out so badly and holds the interest. For a non-Chinese speaker, like myself, some of the dialogue seems a bit over melodramatic, but overall I felt that I could invest in the characters and enjoyed their ‘journeys’. Lam does a good job of handling the action sequences, as you’d expect, and the actors all ‘sell’ their characters well, especially Rosamund Kwan, as Mona, the gangster’s moll.
Eureka Entertainment have done a great job in bringing this fairly obscure film out of the shadows and it looks great in its brand new 2K restoration. There are plenty of special features including:
Audio Commentary by film critic David West – The author of Chasing Dragons: An Introduction into the martial arts film book does a good job revealing lots of interesting and sometimes obscures facts about the movie’s actors and crew. West often quotes passages from past interviews that the stars and director have given in the past, this giving us quite a full picture about them, as individuals, and about the film in general.
Two Adventurers – a new interview with Gary Bettinson, editor of Asian Cinema journal (21.5 mins) – Gary provides a nice overview about Hong Kong cinema, the director, some of the actors and of the film itself. Apparently Ringo Lam favoured location shooting, which was very difficult in Hong Kong, hence much of the film was shot guerrilla style, ‘on the fly’. Lam is also credited as being one of the forerunners of the Heroic Bloodshed subgenre of films, which are probably best represented by the films of John Woo.
Waiting for the Dark-faced god – an interview with screenwriter Sandy Shaw (14.5 mins) – Shaw is a more nuanced interviewee, and sometimes takes a while to tell her stories. However, she’s very knowledgeable about the film and its director who she admired as he respected female scriptwriters unlike many Hong Kong directors and producers. Apparently Sandy did a script refresh on the film, rather than writing it from scratch.
Trailer (3.17 mins) – This clearly focuses on the sex and violence elements within the movie.
Limited edition collector’s booklet featuring a new essay by Hong Kong cinema scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan -Park – this I didn’t get sent so can’t review it.
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