“Final Justice” Theatrical Poster
Director: Parkman Wong
Cast: Danny Lee, Stephen Chow, Shing Fui On, William Ho Ka-Kui, Tommy Wong Kwong-Leung, Victor Hon Kwan, Ricky Yi Fan-Wai, Ken Lo Wai-Kwong
Running Time: 95 min.
By Z Ravas
As much as fans tend to valorize the late 80’s and 90’s Hong Kong scene as a Golden Age for Action Cinema—and it was!—sometimes it’s instructive to remember that not every film released during that era was a genre-defining classic. Sure, Chow Yun-fat and Ti Lung made history when they teamed up for John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow saga, but…they also paired together for City War, which was just okay. And, yes, Ringo Lam directed Chow Yun-fat in the now iconic movie that gave this website its namesake (City on Fire, naturally), but they also made Wild Search a couple years later, which is more or less a remake of Peter Weir’s Witness and another Hong Kong thriller that’s perfectly fine but unremarkable on the whole.
So while I was excited to see Shout Factory make the 1988 cop actioner Final Justice available for digital rental this week—it doesn’t seem like they have a disc release in the works—the movie reminded me that not all 80’s Hong Kong action movies were created equal. Final Justice arrives from director Parkman Wong and follows Danny Lee as a hard-boiled Hong Kong cop. (Danny Lee in the role of a maverick cop who plays by his own rules? Shocking, I know). While tracking down a hardened criminal (The Killer’s Shing Fui-On) who’s already back to his old ways after a recent prison release, Danny Lee makes use of a young getaway driver turned confidential informant, played by Stephen Chow in his debut role. Chow actually won the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards for Best Supporting Actor and he’s solid here, though the silly jackets that he wears in the movie are perhaps a hint that Chow would truly find his footing in the industry once he embraced the comedy genre.
Danny Lee’s character in this film is kind of unlikable: he wears skin-tight blue jeans, drives his motorcycle at reckless speeds, regularly talks back to his superiors, and tells anyone who will listen that he’s the best cop in Hong Kong. You know what? I liked him anyway because Danny Lee is just that charismatic. The story goes that Lee enrolled in the police academy as a youth but didn’t stick around long enough to graduate; yet something of the experience has seemed to linger with him for the rest of his days as he’s always excelled at portraying these law enforcement characters. There’s one point in the movie where it almost seems as though the filmmakers are going out of their way to poke a hole in his protagonist’s self-important bubble—Lee claims he’s never made a mistake in his entire career, then Chow’s character says “What about the suspect you just let escape?” and an embarrassed Lee quickly retorts “That was an accident!”—but, let’s face it, in 1988 these kind of cop movies were still king at the box office and the genre wasn’t quite ready to get that self-reflexive.
Final Justice director Parkman Wong was actually working with guys like Ringo Lam and John Woo as an actor around this same time period, and no doubt he was influenced by their work and the developing Heroic Bloodshed trend while making this film. That said, I wouldn’t recommend going into this film expecting a Tragic Hero epic full of slow-mo shootouts; nevertheless, there are a smattering of car chases, beatdowns, and gun fights here, including that classic maneuver where the bad guys try to pull off a brazen robbery in the middle of the day and everything goes sideways. While Final Justice won’t overwrite your memories of its more well-known and highly esteemed peers in the genre, the film might still be worth programming for a lazy Sunday if you’re a fan of the performers or curious to see Stephen Chow’s first acting gig. At the end of the day, Danny Lee can call himself the toughest cop in Hong Kong and you’re halfway tempted to believe him just because he’s got that Danny Lee swagger.
Z Ravas’s Rating: 6.5/10
Great review Zack! Your point around the fact “not every film released during that era was a genre-defining classic” is a valid one, and one that I think is often overlooked since we usually only get the cream of the crop released on physical media (at least in recent times – you have to go back to the laserdisc era when literally everything seemed to hit the oversized discs regardless of quality!).
There’s a clip of Leslie Cheung being interviewed in Korea during the early 90’s where he makes the exact same point, saying “…it happens that whenever the movie comes to Korea or the other part of the world they’re mainly the quite successful movies in Hong Kong, there are so many bad movies in Hong Kong as well…”
Great retrospective. I actually view City Cops as an under appreciated gem of the Golden Age. Wild Search could have been as well, but the ingredients that made Witness a good movie were missing. (Although Chow being insane enough to do a fire stunt was quite a sight.)
I hate that Danny Lee plays a douchebag in this film. I don’t consider that his forte.