“Operation Hadal” Theatrical Poster
Director: Dante Lam
Cast: Xuan Huang, Yosh Yu, Zhang Hanyu, Karry Wang, Luxia Jiang, Chen Li, Cory Beeston, Yihong Duan, Ivan Kostadinov, Sean Kohnke, Rovaif Babar
Running Time: 146 min.
By Z Ravas
Director Dante Lam must possess one of the most varied filmographies in all of moviedom; just glancing at his body of work reveals the shifting commercial film trends in Hong Kong and China over the last 30 years. The great tragedy of his career might be that he wasn’t born a decade or so earlier, because you sense the man could have reliably turned out one epic pistol opera after another under the tutelage of, say, Tsui Hark’s Film Workshop during its 1980’s peak. Instead, Lam didn’t helm his first feature until the twilight of Hong Kong action cinema in the late Nineties, although he was able to direct at least one movie—the Anthony Wong/Michael Wong fan favorite Beast Cops—that conjured some of that old magic. From there, Lam navigated the changing landscape of Hong Kong’s film industry, directing pop stars as they tried to crossover into movie stardom with pictures like The Twins Effect and Heat Team; heck, he even dabbled in animation (Storm Rider: Clash of the Evils).
Then Dante Lam seemed to find his groove, both as an artist and as a figure in his industry: from about 2008 to 2012, films like The Stool Pigeon and Beast Stalker told gritty crime stories interspersed with breakneck set pieces, rekindling fan hopes that the spirit of Hong Kong action might persist into the new century. If a story was about cops or robbers in some Continue reading →
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