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Full Alert
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - Eureka Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (25th January 2022). |
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The Film
 Hong Kong Film Award (Best Pictures): Ringo Lam (nominated), Best Director: Ringo Lam (nominated), Best Actor: Ching Wan Lau (nominated), Best Film Editing: Marco Mak and Angie Lam (nominated), Best Sound Design (nominated) - Hong Kong Film Awards, 1998 HKFCS Award Best Film (won) and Best Actor: Ching Wan Lau (won) - Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards, 1998 When the police respond to a mass poisoning in an apartment building, they open the rooftop water tanks and discover the body of one of the residents, an architect who has been stabbed and drowned. A description of one of the man's visitors leads Inspector Pao (Black Mask's Ching Wan Lau) to arrest disgraced civil engineer Mak Kwan (Infernal Affairs II's Francis Ng) and his girlfriend Chung Lai-Hung (School on Fire's Amanda Lee). Mak readily confesses to murdering the man because of a gambling debt but Pao realizes that this is as much to secure his girlfriend's freedom as to obfuscate their investigation into the blueprint of a vault he took from the man's apartment and the bomb-making materials found in Kwan's own apartment. Kwan is sentenced to prison and Chung is released, but Pao suspects that Kwan's cousin Chan Wah (Best of the Best's Raymond Cho) will probably try to break Kwan free during his transfer from jail to prison; however, even Chan does not know that the Taiwanese mafia members with whom he is collaborating on the heist – lead by Zang (Cities of Last Things' Jack Kao) – plan to kill both men after the job is done to prevent the police from discovering their involvement. Pao observes Chung's visits to Kwan and decodes what he believes to be communications between Chan and Kwan. In spite of Pao's warning to Kwan that his transport will be heavily-guarded and he will kill the man himself if he tries to escape, the jailbreak proceeds and leads to a car chase and devastating shootout that claims the life of one of Pao's young teammates (Thunderbolt's Kam-Cheong Yung) as well as Brother Sung (Black Mask 2: City of Masks' Marcus Fox) of the Taiwanese mafia. Left to his own devices, Kwan achieves a daring escape by helicopter from the prison and reunites with Chung and Zang only to learn that Chan has been killed by the police (or so Zang claims). Having once possessed a grudging respect for Pao, Kwan undertakes the heist with a series of taunts and terroristic misdirection to distract Pao's team, but Pao might be the only one who can keep him alive once Zang gets what he wants. A return to director Ringo Lam's roots after his first Hollywood sojourn with the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Maximum Risk, Full Alert seems rather run-of-the-mill on paper as far as heist films go – particularly pre-Heat and the endless imitators it spawned – but it is in the execution where the film stands out. Set in a gritty, deglamorized Hong Kong on the verge of handover, there is an air of urban decay, deep darkness, sickly lighting, and characters pitched to hysteria just this side of the line between drama and humor. The chemistry between Ching Wan Lau and Francis Ng is compelling, and the shift in viewer sympathies from driven but guilt-ridden Kwan to gruff, inconsiderate, and seemingly insensitive Pao is as much a part of the plot momentum as the heist storyline. They are both haunted by each having taken a life before, and Kwan's observation that he hates to lose reads as defiant on his side but at first casts Pao's incredibly reckless drive to catch him and foil the heist in an arrogant light and his rallying young partner (Lust, Caution's Kar Lok Chin) when he nearly quits on him to help avenge their fallen colleague as insincere; however, the cliché rapport developed between cop and criminal feels increasingly one-sided as Kwan's misdirections become terroristic – the audience is just as apprehensive about what Kwan has done with Pao's wife (The Beheaded 1000's Monica Chan) as he and his colleagues when his phone call home goes unanswered and the camera pushes in on the closed bedroom door accompanied by the muffled cries of his young son – and his motive for the heist turns out to be more material than the better life he promised Chan and Chung, and Pao's increasingly emotional outbursts prove that he finds no amusement in the chase (or, at least, none since his young colleague's death). Kwan's statement to Pao that it is not easy to kill someone, and that it stays with you forever, means that the bloody finale may be even more devastating for the survivor whose cries segue into the end credits. Lam would only direct one more Hollywood film with the Van Damme vehicle Replicant and his subsequent efforts would be more spaced out compared to his prolific output from the mid-eighties to the late nineties with his final work a short for the anthology Septet: The Story of Hong Kong released posthumously. 
Video
Curiously never dubbed into English, Full Alert came to Tai Seng VHS and later DVD in subtitled from using Mei Ah's laserdisc master which they also put out, which was presumably also the source for M.I.A.'s 2000 UK DVD. When Mei Ah remastered the film in 2004 for their DTS release, Lam recorded a commentary but the new anamorphic transfer was missing a short dialogue scene during the stakeout on Kwan, and that bit is also missing from CN Entertainment's 2018 Blu-ray as well as Eureka's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 Widescreen Blu-ray. Eureka has stated that this was all the licensor provided, and the fact that this shorter cut first turned up on the DVD with a Lam commentary suggests that it might have been an alteration made by the director; however, there is no documentation of it being a director's cut (and it is just as possible that Lam might not even have noticed the omission himself). In spite of that, the image is gorgeous within the context of the film's aesthetic of low-lighting, with an image swarming in a fine layer of grain that becomes more pronounced in the shadows of the urban environs where natural and practical light sources was utilized (a deliberate choice mentioned on the commentary tracks), and the color palette is restrained with the exception of red blood, neons, and some wardrobe blues that are slightly more saturated than the police uniforms. 
Audio
While the film was shot with sync-sound with a mix of Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue and mixed in 5.1 Dolby Digital, this track seems not to have made it onto many home video releases, and – given the Hong Kong video penchant for upmixing and shoddy remixing – it is uncertain whether the DTS and Dolby Digital tracks on the remastered Meh Ah DVD or the 7.1 tracks on the Hong Kong Blu-ray are derived from the original mix or the matrixed stereo fold-down without direct comparison – and this track was apparently also unavailable when Eureka licensed the film from Mei Ah. The LPCM 2.0 stereo track gets the job done as far as directional effects during the action scenes and the spread of Peter Kam's score (with its choral elements and use of "Dies Irae"), however, there is at least one short stretch during the climax coming back to regular motion following slow-motion bit of shooting, squib hits, and anguished cries where there might be some phase cancellation but this too might also be a deliberate distorting effect. The optional English subtitles appear to be free of any noticeable errors. 
Extras
With the exception of the film's theatrical trailer (2:07), the rest of the video extras are audio in nature. First up is an audio commentary by Asian film expert Frank Djeng, NY Asian Film Festival who notes that Lam returned after his Hollywood debut and how the film embodies the anxieties surrounding the handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People's Republic of China. Lam notes that the film was made entirely without permits, including the car chases – only the shootouts were filmed in out-of-the-way locations – the film's emphasis on location work with Djeng pointing out exact locations and their relationship to one another (having noted in some past Hong Kong action commentaries a tendency of filmmakers to build action sequences out of scattered geography) including his own primary school. He also provides background on the cast, including Lam's use of both unknowns as well as actors typecast on TVB as police officers to lend a sense of realism, including Emily Kwan who was as well-known for her stage work as her Category III appearances like Dr. Lamb. Given how sparse the comments on audio commentary by director Ringo Lam – so much so that the subtitles for the track include subtitles for the film dialogue during the many long instances where the track reverts to feature audio – it is entirely possible that Lam might not have noticed the aforementioned missing scene. He emphasizes his desire after his first Hollywood film to make a "100% Hong Kong film" but not to repeat himself with another variation on his biggest hit City on Fire. He speaks highly of his leads and their chemistry, as well as his own emphasis on a "tone of darkness" with the production designer going over-budget trying to make things "cheap and dark" while the cinematographer insisted on shooting an alternate take of the interrogation scene with additional lighting only for Lam to pick the take in which Ching Wan Lau's face was hidden in shadow for much of its length.  The disc also includes an audio interview with composer Peter Kam, conducted by Frank Djeng over the first 85:28 of the film in which the composer recalls that although his father was a band leader he discouraged his son from getting into music. Kam was largely self-taught, learning the Alto Sax but realizing that his lesser affinity for the piano was a weak point when he decided to pursue a music degree, not picking up much in the way of musical fundamentals until college at San Francisco State. He ended up not finishing his degree – discouraged by how his expectations of the life of a composer were not those of his teachers – and recalls in discussing his move to scoring that he was "assigned" Full Alert and given little direction by Lam about the content of the score (in contrast to his work with Johnnie To), and that the religious elements of the score were his idea, stemming from the philosophical nature of the internal conflict haunting both lead characters.
Packaging
Not provided for review were the limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Grégory Sacré (Gokaiju) and collector's booklet featuring new writing by David West (NEO Magazine) included with the first print run of 2000 copies.
Overall
Startlingly-violent and relentlously gritty and grim, Ringo Lam's Full Alert is a fitting swan song to the Hong Kong action genre and pre-1997 Hong Kong itself.
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