PRISON ON FIRE
(Chinatown Video)
Reviewed by Jonathan
Marshall
Prison on Fire is an early film from director Ringo Lam (City
on Fire, Full Alert), co-staring the master of HK hard-boiled roles: Chow
Yun Fat (A Better Tomorrow, The Killer). Lam’s
productions have a gritty, edgy, pressurised feel. Prison on Fire however
transfers Lam’s usual dark, neon-lit urban environments - populated
by fraternally-linked cops and criminals - to the overcrowded, hyper-real, grimy
‘jungle’ of the inmates’ world, ruled over by even more brutal guards.
Although there are many ‘prison films’ to which POF could be compared, Lam’s
work has more in common with Lord of the Flies and other hyperbolic thrillers
than these movies. Lam eschews the traditional approach of focusing on
the heroes’ attempts to escape, and instead depicts the prison environment as a place
which brings out the worst in people.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of POF is the fearful sense of
inevitability that pervades the increasingly visceral, violent conflicts that develop over
the course of the narrative. Tiny, irrelevant details accumulate with an imperious force,
driving the characters into ever more insoluble situations. Their impending doom is writ
large early on in the film. By forcing the cinematography into smaller and smaller spaces,
white walls receding in the face of ominous greens, yellows and browns, spots of sweat on
every character’s face becoming more and more unavoidable, and occasional, echoing
chords punctuating the rhythm of the realist sound design, Lam makes this
highly melodramatic scenario both compelling and convincing. As anger, death and fear
threatens to completely overwhelm every aspect of the movie, one is transported into a
primal, almost mythic environment, with Chow transforming into a hideous,
avenging demon, impervious to pain because he has endured so much, his wrath mirrored by
the storm outside. POF is deliberately hard going in the end, but few films
create such a marvellous form of super-heated realism.
© 2000 Jonathan Marshall
H E R O I C * C I N E M A
http://www.heroic-cinema.com
