FULL ALERT
(Chinatown Video)
Reviewed by Jonathan
Marshall
Full Alert (1997) is one of the most disturbingly affective films
to emerge from Hong Kong in recent years. Director Ringo Lam (City on
Fire) has always tended towards a dark, gritty 1970s sensibility, but although Full
Alert deploys a dulled color cinematography and frequent hand-held camera
digressions, it has more in common with sophisticated, neo-1970s cop films like Ronin,
than with the grainy, edgy feel of Lam’s earlier work. The narrative
ostensibly follows Inspector Pao (Lau Ching Wan) as he tracks down a
complex, very human yet equally ruthless hood named Mak (Francis Ng), who
is planning a daring robbery. While the intricacies of police-work and vivid flashes of
red-and-blue lights color much of the movie, the piece is much more focused on general
principles of good and evil, morality and commitment, and the lasting psychic consequences
of killing. Worrying, washed-out red and white images of violence recur in the night-time
and day-time dreams of the lead characters, giving the sense that neither protagonist will
ever escape these moments. They are doomed to endlessly repeat and relive them. Seconds
after Mak has lectured a captive Pao on how hard it is to kill, the policeman struggles
through a barrel of filth in order to retrieve his gun and continue his pursuit of his
assailant. These are frighteningly driven characters who eventually move into a realm
beyond good and evil.
Somewhere in this process, Pao loses it, and by the finale - set in an
over-cast, stormy dock-yard - our apparent hero has become far more vicious than our
coolly troubled villain, completely reversing their relative moral positions as Pao
methodically beats the shit out of his nemesis and Mak’s girlfriend. The extreme
nature of this resolution translates the film into an almost mythological realm, the roles
of cop and crook becoming indistinguishable. The final vision of Pao’s face
super-imposed over the remains of the conflict, sobbing uncontrollably after having
assured his wife over the phone that he is alright, leaves the audience profoundly
disturbed, suggesting as it does that Pao has crossed into a place from which he may never
return. Full Alert is a harsh, compelling vision with an unsettling, almost
subliminal sound-track of heavy chords and growing, throbbing doubts which effects a
reversal between cop and criminal only seen in Western cinema in the Al Pacino vehicle
Cruising.
© 2000 Jonathan Marshall
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