Fire of Conscience (film review)

You'll get much clearer views of this Tai Hang creature
if you watch Dante Lam's latest... ;b

Before anything else, thanks to those who wrote nice things about my recent Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) film reviews on this blog and also in e-mails to me. And although I'm still in two minds as to whether to resume reviewing movies in earnest, here's going ahead and sharing my thoughts about a Hong Kong movie that had its world premiere at this year's HKIFF but which I waited until after the fest ended to view in a regular cinema/multiplex:-

Fire of Conscience (Hong Kong, 2010)
- Dante Lam, director
- Starring Leon Lai, Richie Jen (AKA Richie Ren), Wang Baoqiang, Liu Kai Chi, Michelle Ye, Vivian Hsu, etc.

I first heard about this crime action thriller whose Chinese title translates as Fire Dragon late last summer -- when excited friends living in the atmospheric neighborhood of Tai Hang reported seeing film crews shooting a re-enactment of its famous fire dragon street parade over a few nights, during which personalities like Chin Kar Lok (who action directed the Dante Lam movie) and Richie Jen also were spotted in the area.

And although the amazing creature had previously been captured on celluloid in such as Lawrence Lau's Ballistic (2008), the prospect alone of seeing it in its glory in a movie got me looking forward to checking out this film that tells the story of two cops: both of whom were born in the Chinese year of the dragon; one of whom may look, as someone teased him, more like a bad than good guy but actually is a dedicated policeman; the other of whom is far more bad-ass as well as just plain bad than his physical appearance and demeanor gets people assuming.

So it's pretty ironic then that I feel obliged to report that the portions of this film in which the fire dragon metaphorically as well as literally figures are by far the weakest sections of the work for many reasons -- and are what make its conclusion feel too forced and so much less emotionally impacting than the director's The Beast Stalker (which, more than by the way, was my second favorite Hong Kong movie of 2008).

On the brighter side, when a parade involving a 67 meter-long fiery 'dragon' made up of thousands of burning incense sticks and stalks of dry straw and 'pearl' grass is a visual low rather than high point of a film, this can't but mean that this movie which cautions against judging books by their covers offers up plenty of amazing sights. Among those absolute stand-outs are the seriously incredible opening scenes that consist of imaginative tableaux of the kind I don't think I've ever seen before in a film (and most definitely not one out of Hong Kong) and a chase scene that ends up with two man taking an amazing tumble several feet down onto a busy Causeway Bay road.

Upon adding into the equation such as an explosive moment that is at least as gasp-inducing as the one involving a soldier getting way too close to a cannon's mouth in Peter Chan's The Warlords (2007) and a scene that involves a woman giving birth that is more eye-opening than that in Tsui Hark's Time and Tide (2000), one can be forgiven for thinking that Dante Lam primarily conceived this movie as a series of scenes that would visually wow audience members. If he did so, then he very much succeeded.

Somewhere along the line, however, he (and/or scriptwriter Jack Ng) also looked to have the kind of conclusion that introduced a sense of karma like the first Infernal Affairs (2002) as well as tied things up a la The Beast Stalker (and -- this observation coming from my having just viewed Park Shin Woo's White Night (2009) last night -- many a Korean film). This, alas, the filmmakers were less successful in enacting. Consequently, Fire of Conscience concludes in a way that fails to satisfy, not least because it's so much less powerful and effective than the rest of the movie deserved.

My rating for this film: 8 (despite it unsatisfactory ending because so much of what preceded it had been so very good, even amazing)