A few groups of ultimate badass killer burglars get into death feuds with each other because nobody can act professional for just a few seconds at a time. A couple of love triangles here: hot dancer Mona is dating extreme badass Chow Yun-Fat (in his extreme badass era, same year as Hard Boiled) then when he disappears she bounces to sniveling ponytail weenie Anthony Wong. And Wong bounces from his best friend Chow to gay magician Simon Yam, falling in with Yam’s gang of villains (a girl named Slut and a guy who I just saw Riki-oh kill).

Injured Chow rescuing a dog:

Chow is supposedly killed on a job in Thailand, so everyone’s upset when he comes back around and starts using traitor Anthony as a spy. Didn’t feel as distinctive as the last Ringo Lam movie I saw, just a 90s actioner, the actors giving it as much life as they can until it’s time for the finale when twenty cars blow up while Chow and Yam have their monologues and shootouts. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time watching these psychos torment and kill each other.

Shaolin monks are made illegal, so all monks have to run or fight or die. Monk Fong (Wong Fei-hung in Drunken Master III the same year) and Carman Lee (between Wicked City and Lifeline) are on the run, get thrown in a trap-filled prison temple and have to fight and scheme their way out. One of the best-looking HK blu-rays around, the blood and intense brutality coming through crystal clear.

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: