Dir. Ringo Lam, Hong Kong, 1995, 110 mins, subtitled
Cast: Andy Lau, Jaclyn Wu, Rosamund Kwan, David Chiang, Paul Chun
Review by Colin Dibben
Wai Lok-yan (Lau) is a Cambodian refugee who has grown up in Thailand after an uncle rescued him from the killing field (house, actually, but close to a lush green tropical field) that saw the rest of his family murdered. Wai has joined the Thai Air Force but his discovery that the man who murdered his family is now rich and living in Hong Kong sets him on the path of vengeance. This takes him to Hong Kong and then San Francisco, where he teams up with his father’s and uncle’s old CIA partners to latch on to Crystal (Wu), his father’s killer’s daughter.
It gets even more tangled. His father’s killer, Liu (Chun) has a mistress (Kwan) who discovers what drives Wai and seeks to protect him. But her growing obsession threatens to expose Wai and Crystal and kill them all.
The great Ringo Lam made The Adventurers just before he went to the US to make Maximum Risk with Jean Claude van Damme. This film is both a calling card delivered on a silver platter to Hollywood – and a proud celebration of the different angles Asian cinema in general and Hong Kong in particular could bring to the action genre.
The most interesting elements here are the twists on cinema tropes: the crime film, the Vietnam War and its related cinema seen from a different perspective on the same side; the nods to Top Gun, the use of locations seen through eyes and souls that have a culturally different sensibility.
The action sequences are very watchable, of course, but even there the marked sensibility that comes from a cultural differences can be noted: for example I can’t imagine a scene like that where Jaclyn Wu is naked under a towel as bullets explode the wooden wall around her in a Hollywood film, even in the 1980s.
Anyone who likes action cinema will like The Adventurers, which once again shows what a broad church action movies constitute.
