• 人民英雄 (People’s Hero)

7/18/26 (Sat)

Derek Yee’s 1987 thriller is a deft Hong Kong homage to Dog Day Afternoon. Various characters are mulling around at a bank: a housewife closely watching the price of gold (the US has just attacked Iraq), a spoiled young woman, a man loudly criticizing the bank’s service, and others. In the midst of those activities, two bumbling young men, Tony Leung and Ronald Wong, enter the bank with plans to rob it. That goes awry when the latter panics and has an epileptic seizure. Leung abandons their scheme and tries to get the friend out, but drops his gun – and the resulting chaos forces him to grab the gun and keep everyone hostage.

Quickly finding himself out of his league, he intends to give himself up. But those plans go astray as well when an actual criminal, Lung Ti, emerges from the crowd and takes the would-be crooks themselves hostage along with the others. Lung had planned one final robbery and a quick escape from Hong Kong on a boat. His plans now foiled, he takes the lead in the standoff with the police.

He offers to release the hostages if the police bring his girlfriend out of jail, where she has been interred due to a slipup on his part, and deliver her to him. In his exchange with the hostages, the criminal proves a more sympathetic character than we had expected, helping a wounded man, giving CPR to another, offering cigarettes to others, and generally behaving rather generously for a killer. On the other hand, he decides that he has to kill a hostage to make the police take him seriously, and forces the crowd to choose by playing a kid’s game akin to rock, paper, scissors.

Meanwhile, the imprisoned girlfriend has refused to cooperate, still furious at Lung for leaving her to take the rap. It is only after much prodding that she finally agrees to go to the scene. At that, Lung leaves the bank safely surrounded by the hostages (as in Dog Day) and enters the van with them, seemingly ready to get away. But when his girlfriend rejects him, he goes crazy… and things do not end well.

The film manages to turn the original story into something uniquely HK in style in an adroit mixture of comedy and suspense. A very young Tony Leung, taking the Pacino role, already has an aura all his own and was deserving of his Best Supporting Actor award. (There are actually two Tony Leungs in the film, but it’s pretty clear which one will be a future star.) Wong was the counterpart to the wispy nervous character in Dog Day, and I suppose the two could be interpreted as a gay couple, though the movie doesn’t dwell on that. Elaine Jin as the girlfriend (essentially Dog Day’s transgender guy) was very good as well in the film’s other award-winning turn. But the film unquestionably belongs to Lung, cementing his comeback after the previous year’s A Better Tomorrow. He handles both the sincere and comic sides of his character with tremendous skill and makes us care about him. His empathy for others contrasts with the police chief who wants him dead at any cost, even if they lose some hostages. Lung is the core to the film. Others are more typically HK in their overacting, but they provide variety and give Lung and Leung something to respond to.

No real violence or blood until the very end. The tension is nicely built even with the humor. An unexpectedly solid film.