The Big Heat

...it's that the Hong Kong police are dangerously incompetent. Also, the tone of this movie is all over the place. In one moment a cop's fiancé is brutally murdered and a few seconds later another cop is running through the streets carrying a bomb like Adam West in The Batman Movie.

THE BIG HEAT is an impressive crime thriller, shot in the streets and urban spaces of Hong Kong and filled with chases, shootouts and fistfights right up until the final action climax. While it doesn't have the sheer spectacle of John Woo's HK crime films (THE KILLER, HARD-BOILED), it is consistently gripping and suspenseful and generally more believable than Woo's films (at least until the final over-the-top battle). Simple one-line-plot: four cops go after a businessman in league with smugglers after the lead cop's former partner is brutally murdered.

The romantic interests are expertly interspersed into the story so that they never detract from the action, but become a part of it. This is a no-nonsense film from beginning to end, with no fat and no waste. There are numerous set-pieces, such as a face-off in a hospital elevator shaft, that are so tightly shot and edited as to rank with similar scenes in the best Hollywood urban crime thrillers.

The stars include Waise Lee (A BULLET IN THE HEAD), as the lead cop on the case, and Joey Wang (A CHINESE GHOST STORY), as a nurse who is romanced by one of the cops. The actor playing Lee's partner is none other than Philip Kwok, a one-time kung fu star (one of the Five Venoms), who, in line with the film's more authentic action, doesn't get to do any kung fu, but instead gets to shoot, run, chase, brawl, and drive at high speeds.

I should point out that the film includes much brutal violence, including beatings, mutilation and gruesome deaths. It's not for the squeamish, but if you're a fan of gritty, down-and-dirty crime thrillers, this DVD is for you.

This film, The Big Heat (Hong Kong, 1988) is outstanding, and it shows exactly what differs these movies from others. This is directed by Johnnie To and Andrew Kam and the story involves a little bunch of police officers (including Waise Lee, the smooth actor from Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head) who are on the trail of a criminal league which is also responsible for one of the cops' partner's death. What follows is non-stop action and never before seen cinematic mayhem.

I'm mostly attracted by the apocalyptic tone the film has. In many Hong Kong films from that period, the main theme is that what will happen to Hong Kong in 1997..? It is a subject matter that scares and really concerns people in these films. But the infernal visions of The Big Heat can also be seen universally and as a statement of the whole globe's future and attitudes which destroy it. The apocalyptic element is maintained by the action and gory mayhem, which never actually stops during the film. There are no chances to have a break and be in peace. The whole system is collapsing and everybody has to fight for life all the time or the "stronger will get you."

The action scenes and gun battles are incredible (sorry for using these adjectives so much). When I first saw this, I watched it on VHS tape, dubbed in English and fullscreen, but still that tape was uncut. When I first saw it, the film didn't have any particular effect on me, although one extremely brutal car scene stayed in my mind, but the film as a whole didn't "blow me away" back then. Then I purchased the DVD which is subtitled in English and letterboxed and after that second viewing, I was kicked in the head. This is the case usually with HK movies: they have to be seen many times, before you really can see through them and appreciate them. The Big Heat showed its real face for me during that second time and now I've ranked the film among the most outrageous, fast paced and also savagely violent action films ever. And I think that people with open minds will come to that conclusion too.

If we talk about the violence in HK films, the violent Woo movies are not too hard to take because they are so beautiful and full of more or less mysterious elements (white birds/doves, crushing statues, and so on..) but the violence in Big Heat is very different. It comes pretty close to violence in Ringo Lam's masterful Full Contact which is also pretty savage and not "beautifully" violent and symbolic as John Woo's films. I really love Woo's artistic work too, but the attitudes in his films are very different than Big Heat's.

A local collector has told me that he has tried to show Big Heat to some of his colleagues at work, and no one has managed to sit through it! That really tells something about what are chances for mainstream audiences to understand these kinds of films which DON'T intend to entertain stupid masses.

In its own masterful genre, The Big Heat is a 10 out of 10 points experience and it can be recommended only for fanatics of the challenging Far East cinema.

Big Heat is no masterpiece, the editing is sometimes sloppy, the music score is stolen fragments thrown together, there are a few seconds unnecessary comic relief here and there (but only seconds), the acting is often mediocre (even though Waise Lee is okay), the camerawork is not very impressive, the dialogue is nothing special and the story is nothing new.

But despite the obvious flaws, if you like your movies violent you will be entertained.

This is one brutal movie. You will see people get massacred and torn to pieces, you will see gunshots to the head, gunshots with beautiful bloodsquibs and much more extreme violence well scattered from the shock beginning to the brutal ending. I can assure you that the incredible death by car scene is the most violent you have ever seen. The other reviewer Brian Camp has already mentioned the exciting and of course extremely violent elevator shaft scene. Not even the children are safe in this movie, unlike Hollywood movies were they don't even dare to get a dog killed. The pacing is good so you will not be bored and the story is no masterpiece but it works. It is about revenge and those stories seem to work no matter how many revenge movies you have seen. We need bloody revenge. If you do not like brutality do not see this movie. 8 / 10.

A fierce and fatalistic Hong Kong policier. As produced by Tsui Hark and co-directed by the great Johnny To, this gore-drenched neo noir is as far removed from a John Woo bullet ballet as possible. Unlike Woo's romantic notions of honor and loyalty in a morally bankrupt world, the vision here is bleaker, more unsparing. There are no beautifully choreographed dances of deaths, no heroic displays of bloodshed and brotherhood. The filmmakers pummel our violence-jaded sensibilities, rubbing our noses in the sundry ways a human being can be physically mangled or emotionally savaged. They're determined to make us feel the pain, and they succeed in spades. This one fricken hurts to watch.

The film is a Hong Kong travel agent's worst nightmare, a portrait of the city as a neon-lit charnel house. The protagonist is a stolid, world-weary police detective (Waise Lee), whose nerve-impaired shooting hand serves as the perfect symbol of this pitiless urban jungle-- it's beyond repair, as out of control as the landscape he inhabits. In a rare star turn, Lee (the memorable villain of Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" and "Bullet in the Head") is coolly persuasive at suggesting bottled torment; he makes reticence seem like a powerful emotion.

The crime story involving the pursuit of a Malaysian drug cartel is routine stuff, as is the inclusion of a clumsy rookie cop assigned as partner to Lee. But Hark and To invest these familiar tropes with a profoundly unsettling despair that gets under your skin and stays there.

The Big Heat doesn't just burn -- it scalds.