Full Alert (1997, Ringo Lam)

Imprisoned bad guy Mak Kwan (Francis Ng of The Mission) gets sprung by his gang, so the Mad Detective (Lau Ching-wan) follows the baddie’s girl (Amanda Lee of Human Pork Chop), correctly thinking they’ll connect, while the escapee plots a big heist of a racetrack vault.

The gang watching their bomb trap go boom:

Pretty good cops-n-robbers movie, in which almost everybody involved gets killed horribly. People love Ringo Lam, but I dunno. Sean Gilman’s letterboxd at least gives you something to think about, calling this movie The End of Hong Kong:

Sure the genre, and Hong Kong, goes on. But everything that follows, your Johnnie Tos and Andrew Laus and so on, is different. Less immediate, less solid. A level removed from what was. Films about films or ideas or ideas of films.

Mak Kwan’s great success, with a few minutes to live: