Prison On Fire VCD

Ringo Lam's brother, Nam Yin, a producer (of the Troublesome Night series) and a gentleman well-equipped with underworld contacts, gave Lam the general outline and plenty of insider details for this cellblock epic. The scriptwriter chopped out the script in seven days, and they were off. Lam was hot off his "Best Director" win at the Hong Kong film awards for City on Fire and Chow Yun-fat was hot off his breakthrough role in John Woo's 1986 A Better Tomorrow. Tony Leung Kar-fai wasn't hot off anything, but he's a good actor, anyways. Needless to say, the flick hit big.

A worm's eye view of prison life, Prison on Fire follows Yiu (Tony Leung), an accidental murderer in Stanley Prison. Dropped into this bare cement world with hardly a survivor's bone in his body, Yiu manages to irritate all the wrong people even before the first reel is over. Fortunately for him, and the audience, he really ticks off Ching (Chow Yun-fat) who subsequently takes Yiu under his wing. Chow is in full-on charmer mode, playing a jailhouse Monkey King and resident trickster who knows how to play all the angles for his maximum benefit and the amusement of his cellmates.

But in prison everyone's a rock, everywhere's a hard place and everyone is stuck between one or the other, or both. Yiu manages to get on the bad side of Mickey, a jailhouse triad leader; Madly, another jailhouse triad leader; and Bill, yet another jailhouse triad leader. Lots of triads in Hong Kong prisons. Not much space. The violence is, needless to say, continual and catastrophic. Homemade shivs, folding stools, and sheets of plywood are repeatedly applied for crippling effect. Ching tries to comfort Yiu, while keeping him out of trouble, but into all this comes Scarface (Roy Cheung), a corrections officer who wants everyone in prison to dance to his tune. One can't tell if he's out-and-out evil, or just mildly Satanic, but either way he's trouble for Ching.

Ringo Lam infuses every scene with his trademark urgency, but for such a tough guy it's the small still moments that stand out, notably a New Year's celebration wherein Ching tells Yiu what he's in for while the men all dance with one another to the strains of Teresa Tang's "Tien Mat Mat". Like a slow blooming flower, the movie unfolds until it blossoms into apocalyptic hysteria, and then it expands even further until it becomes clear that Ringo Lam isn't just indicting prisons and prisoners but all of us who think we need them, and all of us who think they work.

by Grady Hendrix