Revisiting CITY ON FIRE (1987) – The Chow Yun-fat Hong Kong classic that inspired Reservoir Dogs, and is coming soon to 4K UHD

 

All Images Courtesy Shout! Studios

American audiences are about to gain access to an absolute treasure trove of top-tier 1980s and 90s Hong Kong cinema which has long been very difficult to see in the US. Many of the greatest films to come out of Hong Kong during that era have been legally unavailable in most of the world for a couple decades, because of the bizarre distribution-rights nightmare surrounding the entire catalogs of the iconic Golden Princess and Cinema City film studios. Now Shout! Factory has finally managed to sort out the mess and acquire the rights, and they are beginning to re-release these long-unavailable films under their new Hong Kong Cinema Classics label.

 

The first film to be announced for the Hong Kong Cinema Classics line is Ringo Lam's cult-favorite 1987 "heroic bloodshed" crime thriller City on Fire, starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee. City on Fire is a beloved Hong Kong classic in its own right, and considered an excellent example of the heroic bloodshed subgenre, which is best typified by John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, and The Killer. However, it also has another very different claim to fame. City on Fire first became widely known to American audiences in the 1990s due to the notorious fact that Quentin Tarantino largely borrowed the plot of the film for Reservoir Dogs. Depending on who you ask and how favorable their assessment is, Reservoir Dogs is either a loving homage to City on Fire, reworking the core story into a very different context, or it is a shameless wholesale ripoff of Ringo Lam's film. Shout! Factory giving City on Fire a high profile re-release will undoubtedly reignite this debate, and introduce it to a whole new generation of cinephiles who have not been able to compare the films themselves due to City On Fire being very difficult to see in the US for a very long time. So as we look forward to Shout! Factory's new UHD/blu-ray of this long-neglected film, let's try to get to the bottom of this debate once again, examining City on Fire both on its own merit as a classic work of Hong Kong cinema, and in comparison to Quentin Tarantino’s own undeniable classic.

 

City on Fire stars Chow Yun-fat as an undercover cop, whose job is to infiltrate gangs, lead to the arrest of their leaders, and pull it all off without suspicion so he can keep his cover for the next assignment. But the job is wearing on his mental health, and his sense of ethics: having to befriend and gain the trust of men who he will eventually have to betray is taking a toll on him. But before he can quit, he is given one more assignment: a gang of highly skilled jewelry thieves have knocked over a couple Hong Kong jewelers already, and they don’t mind killing people who get in their way. His job is to work his way into the gang, and be assigned on their next big heist. But along the way, he becomes good friends with one of the gang’s core members, a ruthless but loyal and likable master thief played by Danny Lee, setting the stage for another tragedy of divided loyalty and conflicted feelings over morals and honor.

 

If you’re coming to City on Fire already a fan of Reservoir Dogs, you’ll notice that that’s largely the same plot… but in the opposite direction. Reservoir Dogs begins in the chaotic aftermath of the jewelry heist gone wrong, introduces the camaraderie and friendship of Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange and Harvey Keitel’s Mr. White, and spends more than its first half in the pressure-cooker environment of the gang’s hideout as they realize that one of them must be an undercover cop, but they aren’t sure who. Mr. Orange turning out to be that undercover cop is a midpoint reveal, and everything that happened prior to the heist, including his infiltration of the gang, is told in flashbacks after that reveal. City on Fire, on the other hand, is told in chronological order, and we know that Chow Yun-fat is an undercover cop from the start, because that’s how he is introduced. The aftermath of the fateful jewelry heist, the framing device in Reservoir Dogs, is here the climax of the film. This is a movie about an undercover cop infiltrating a gang, as opposed to Tarantino’s film being about a gang, one of whom turns out to be an undercover cop.

 

The story beats that have been reordered are largely the same, but the plot being structured in a completely different way makes the films a very different experience from one another. Indeed, watching City on Fire for the first time with the Reservoir Dogs parallels in mind is a very distracting experience, since the story playing out in chronological order means that it takes quite a while – about half the movie – for Ringo Lam’s film to seriously start to resemble Tarantino’s. City on Fire being best known in America because of this piece of trivia honestly does the film no favors, because American first-time viewers watching the movie through that lens might find themselves unable to see the forest for the trees; being so busy comparing and contrasting (or more likely, spending the first half of the film thinking that it doesn’t resemble Reservoir Dogs nearly as much as they expected) that they don’t fully appreciate what a very good crime thriller it is in its own right.

 

As such, it is best to try and set that bit of trivia aside, save your Reservoir Dogs comparing until the end, and try to enjoy City on Fire on its own terms. Eventually the comparisons become unavoidable; once the fateful heist happens, and the movie starts to speed towards its violent climax, it lines up with Tarantino’s film in a way that is hard to ignore. The climaxes of the two films are very close to identical, and once you reach this point, the accusations that Tarantino ripped off Ringo Lam start to feel quite justified. Prior to that point, however, it is a very different animal, and is best appreciated as its own variety of slow-burn undercover cop drama.

 

City on Fire certainly has a lot of strong points worth celebrating on their own merits. First and foremost, there are its two powerhouse leads, playing excellent, morally complicated characters. Following his arc as a conflicted undercover cop from the beginning, we get to spend a lot more time in the head of Chow Yun-fat’s officer Ko Chow than we do in the head of Mr. Orange. Chow is excellent in his role (at least, when he is in his undercover-cop element – more on that later), bringing a lot of tortured emotion and moral confusion which is palpably powerful. Fresh off of A Better Tomorrow, he proves once again why he was one of the coolest and most charismatic movie stars in 1980s and 90s Hong Kong. And Danny Lee matches him with a quietly understated performance that occasionally explodes into violence, as the master thief who we know can be extremely vicious, but who we are nonetheless charmed by, and come to like in spite of ourselves.  Fans of The Killer will really enjoy seeing Chow and Lee together two years before that iconic film, with the roles reversed: this time with Chow as the cop and Lee as the criminal.

 

And of course, as all the best heroic bloodshed movies do, City on Fire has plenty of intense, gritty, in-your-face, kinetic action sequences. The movie makes a bold first impression with a mostly-handheld action sequence racing through the stalls of a street marketplace, and provides several more great action scenes where that came from, likewise typically using handheld camerawork to pack a punch. One key difference between this film and Reservoir Dogs is that Tarantino’s film keeps the heist largely offscreen, possibly as a matter of budget; this film shows us everything, in classic 1980s Hong Kong action film style.

 

However, City on Fire definitely has its flaws as well. It is a very good example of a heroic bloodshed film, but a few factors hold it back from being an unequivocally great one. Some aspects of the story are definitely stronger than others, with Chow Yun-fat's relationship with his girlfriend being a particularly weak link. The scenes involving his personal life are mostly broadly comedic scenes of misunderstandings leading to fights with his girlfriend, and they aren't particularly funny, and somewhat feel like they've come from a different movie. They see his character transform from a tough, conflicted, street-smart cop to an absolute clown in a way that doesn't quite work. And while Ringo Lam's direction on this film is solid, it is not quite as strong as other films in the genre. It does not reach the heights of emotional intensity and breathtaking visual style that John Woo's heroic bloodshed films like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled do ( although to be fair those films are setting an incredibly high bar), and indeed Ringo Lam himself improved as a visual stylist over the years, re-teaming with Chow Yun-fat for the fantastically hyper-stylized Full Contact in 1992, which is arguably a better film than this one. That trio of John Woo films has already been announced by Shout! Factory as upcoming releases in their Hong Kong Cinema Classics line; I am very much hoping that Full Contact will follow sometime in the near future.

 

Sill, while it might not quite be great, City on Fire is a very very good film, and one that is definitely worth recommending. And as far as the question of whether Tarantino ripped it off is concerned, my assessment is that Reservoir Dogs definitely borrows heavily from City on Fire, but that it is more of a reworking of the concept – although close enough that it probably should not be uncredited. Reservoir Dogs is certainly such a different film in so many fundamental ways that I think it would be entirely unfair to say that it lifts everything from City on Fire. They are far more different films than the people who call Tarantino’s a straight-up ripoff would have you believe. However, A LOT of Reservoir Dogs is lifted from this film, in terms of story, if not structure and emphasis. Enough that it really feels like Reservoir Dogs should have probably had a "based on the screenplay by Ringo Lam " credit - had it pulled this much material from another American film, Tarantino absolutely would have gotten sued, I have no doubt.

 

And yet still, I do think they are fundamentally different enough to say that the accusations of wholesale ripoff are unfair, and I think the two films are best appreciated for their differences, with their similarities mostly being an interesting bit of trivia. I have no doubt that a lot of people will watch City on Fire on Shout! Factory's new disc for the first time because they have heard that Reservoir Dogs rips off the film – and that definitely is a good thing insofar as it will encourage people to check this movie out. However when they do check it out, I hope that they are able to view it on its own merits, and not just watch it in the interest of comparison. City on Fire is definitely best appreciated as a very good Hong Kong action/thriller in its own right, and I am so glad that with this new blu-ray/UHD/4K-digital release, American audiences will finally have that chance again.

 

-  Christopher S. Jordan

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