- Actors: Yun-Fat Chow, Danny Lee, Yueh Sun, Carrie Ng, Roy Cheung
- Directors: Ringo Lam
- Writers: Ringo Lam, Jack Maeby, Sai Shing Sun
- Producers: Ringo Lam, Catherine S.K. Chang, Karl Maka
- Format: Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
- Language English
- Region: Region 1 (US and Canada DVD formats.)
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.85:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Classification: Unrated (US MPAA rating. See details.)
- Studio: Dimension
- DVD Release Date: 17 July 2001
- Run Time: 101 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- ASIN: B00005BABM
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 111,120 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
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Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review
Widely acknowledged as the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, Ringo Lam's terse gangland melodrama City On Fire shows this idiosyncratic action movie director at his darkest. Chow Yun Fat plays Ku, an undercover cop buried so deeply inside the Hong Kong criminal fraternity that he no longer knows which side of the law he's supposed to be on. Infiltrating a dangerous gang of armed jewel thieves, he wins the friendship and respect of Fu, a hard-bitten gunman played with steely reserve by Danny Lee. As Ku is increasingly estranged from the police and as Fu watches his fellow gangsters cracking under the strain of pulling off their biggest heist yet, Lam paints a grim portrait of desperate men losing control of their lives. Chow Yun Fat brings a genuinely rattled quality to his performance as a lone individual living on the last of his nerves, and Lam keeps tight control over the sense of menace as Fu, who casually accepts death as an occupational hazard, warily lets Ku into his life. A mordant sense of loss and disillusionment hangs over both characters, starkly offset by the twinkling Christmas lights festooning the streets in preparation for the holiday season... sets the mood for the film's bitterest moment: a brutal metal-shredding car chase accompanied by a tinny disco version of "Joy to the World". Other highpoints include the taut three-way standoff between a dead-eyed Fu and surviving gang members as they argue at gunpoint over Ku's loyalty, a scene Tarantino later reworked in Reservoir Dogs, and the heavy ballistics of the final shootout as the police surround and close in on the thieves' warehouse hideout. Like the man with the gun says: "Let's go to work." --Ken Hollings
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:VHS Tape
Danny Lee plays the all time big baddie in this classic herioc bloodshed from Ringo Lam. The inspiration for Resevior Dogs, it is a favourite among many Chow Yun Fat and Hong Kong movie lovers. The super cool Chow Yun Fat plays his role tremendously (as usual) as an undercover cop who gets too close to bank robber boss Danny Lee. All hell breaks lose when Danny finds out about Chow, and like all good HK movies... an action packed finale is expected! You'll love this movie from the first minute.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Well-made HK cops and robbers flick that is lifted from the average by Chow and Danny boy's essaying of roles they can play in their sleep and the kinetic direction of Ringo Lam. It is bloodier than the norm for this early period of Heroic Bloodshed and the expected scripting deficiencies which plague most of these films is not really a hindrance when you have Chow on the case. Reservoir Dogs fans will have a blast spotting how many scenes are ripped off from this formative crime thriller and there really is a lot of similarity and not just during the warehouse climax and de rigeur Mexican standoff. Lee and Fat really are prototypes for Keitel and Roth in QT's later critical hit and let's not pretend otherwise that such hagiography is the rich man's plagiarism. This film is not a classic HK staple compared with the real gold to be found in the genre and buyers beware that the Dimension Region 1 disc is dubbed and has had the soundtrack tinkered with before adding to your basket.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Famed among Tarantino's admirers and detractors alike as the film that inspired/was ripped off by Reservoir Dogs, Ringo Lam's City On Fire doesn't really provide much in the way of fuel or ammunition for either camp: in truth, it's a very different animal with only the last ten minutes bearing much resemblance to the massively-chinned fading wunderkind's breakthrough movie. Nor is it quite the classic of Asian cinema it is often held to be (presumably by those who haven't seen it considering how often it is wildly inaccurately described), but rather a solidly crafted Hong Kong cops and robbers flick that does its job well for 104 minutes but doesn't exactly sear itself on your memory. Yes, it does end up in a warehouse with three crooks having a Mexican standoff over an undercover cop bleeding to death from a stomach wound on the floor, but the bulk of the film is concerned with Chow Yun Fat's undercover cop trying to quit but forced into that fatal one last job infiltrating Danny Lee's gang of cop-killing jewel robbers.
Budget restraints restrict the amount of action, though what there is is typically well-handled, while as a dramatic character study it is somewhat diluted by the clumsy comedy with Chow's fiancée and the signs of the usual making-it-up-as-we-go-along Hong Kong thriller screen writing that sees Lee's character change from stylish city slicker in the robbery scenes to a rather more simple-minded working Joe as he and Chow bond while hiding out before the last big job. It's not too strong on logic either, with some of the police too happy to torture one of their own and conspire to arrest him for it not to seem like stretching dramatic contrivance to breaking point at times. Yet for all that, on its own terms it works as exactly the kind of audience picture it was intended as - an unpretentious quality thriller a couple of notches above the production-line norm for the genre with a side-order of fatalism on the rocks.
Sadly, while boasting the best picture quality of any release of this title (as well as the original Cantonese soundtrack) the Hong Kong Legends UK DVD has had the color regraded from the cinematographer's original intentions.
Budget restraints restrict the amount of action, though what there is is typically well-handled, while as a dramatic character study it is somewhat diluted by the clumsy comedy with Chow's fiancée and the signs of the usual making-it-up-as-we-go-along Hong Kong thriller screen writing that sees Lee's character change from stylish city slicker in the robbery scenes to a rather more simple-minded working Joe as he and Chow bond while hiding out before the last big job. It's not too strong on logic either, with some of the police too happy to torture one of their own and conspire to arrest him for it not to seem like stretching dramatic contrivance to breaking point at times. Yet for all that, on its own terms it works as exactly the kind of audience picture it was intended as - an unpretentious quality thriller a couple of notches above the production-line norm for the genre with a side-order of fatalism on the rocks.
Sadly, while boasting the best picture quality of any release of this title (as well as the original Cantonese soundtrack) the Hong Kong Legends UK DVD has had the color regraded from the cinematographer's original intentions.
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