PRISON ON FIRE II
(Chinatown Video)
Reviewed by Jonathan
Marshall
Where the first of director Ringo Lam’s hyperbolic,
pressure-cooker prison dramas was a unique creation - a super-heated Hong Kong Lord of
the Flies - POF II is a more emotionally varied film which owes much to
prison caper films like Cool Hand Luke or The Great Escape. Like the
lackadaisical heroes of these films, Chow Yun Fat (Anna and the King,
The Replacement Killers) plays an amusing jerk - a ‘real character’ -
whose idiosyncratic strength cannot be extinguished by his brutal warders. Evil guard Zau
may not quite be ‘The Man With No Eyes’ (he does not always wear sunglasses),
but he is just as stonily nasty, and like Paul Newman’s Luke from
the same film, the death of Chow’s mother and other external, family
dramas gives the prisoner a wanderlust and need to escape. Chow’s
role as Ching even echoes Newman’s in that both figures have a
slightly dippy companion who somewhat foolishly looks up to the other prisoner and admires
the stories he tells.
Where the first film depended upon a simple directness, a focus on almost
primal essentials to produce an overwhelming study of inevitable violence, this sequel is
a more filled-out film which frequently drifts into typically naff, funny HK-style humour.
Even so, this in no way takes away from the incredibly over the top, hyper-real violence
of the finale. After enduring much that was good, but considerably more that was
appalling, Chow’s character settles on violent, physical, personal
revenge which ends in mutilation. Moreover while Prison on Fire was largely
indifferent regarding the general guard population (or indeed the other prisoners, with
Biu especially as a wonderfully amusing supporting character), in Prison on Fire II several
‘good warders’ emerge, muddying the moral waters. POF II is not as
compelling as the first film, but as a many-textured Chow Yun Fat vehicle,
it is a highly engaging work.
© 2000 Jonathan Marshall
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