“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 The Beast Within 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 fashion, you knew it was in good hands with Lam; for a moment, the director was something like a more earnest Johnnie To, less concerned with genre deconstruction and more committed to sweaty melodrama and kinetic gunplay. He even solidified his retinue of acting talent, frequently working with familiar faces like Nick Cheung and Richie Jen.
All that changed in 2016, when Dante Lam made Operation Mekong and entered into what, at this point, seems like his ‘final form’ as a commercial filmmaker: someone who makes big-budget action movies that also function as thinly-veiled militaristic propaganda. Then again, I have to wonder if 2025’s Operation Hadal represents the end of this particular phase of Lam’s career simply because…I don’t know how Lam produces anything more over the top or chest-pumpingly patriotic than this! Operation Hadal opens at a frenetic crescendo which resembles the climax of most other action movies, with a group of foreign mercenaries taking hostages on an oil platform in Chinese territorial waters, which leads a crack team of Chinese commandos to stage a daring aerial rescue with jet propulsion packs. (I don’t dare to dream that this is some kind of homage to Iron Angels 3). Very, very quickly I realized Hadal was not going to be concerned with anything so fragile as a sense of realism. Instead, it resembles some unruly merger of video games like Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty, the novels of Tom Clancy, and that Benghazi movie from Michael Bay—all set to a score by Elliot Leung that does its damndest to out-do Hans Zimmer at his own game.
Is this movie good? I can’t say it’s particularly good, but Operation Hadal is somehow worth a watch if you want to witness a stupefying action movie in which the camera never stops careening through massive sets, in which we rarely go five minutes without an establishing shot of a computer-generated submarine, in which the fiery climax features not one but two robot attack dogs with back-mounted rocket launchers. In the words of Johnny Carson: this is wild, wild stuff. Even the movie’s supposed aim of serving as propaganda for China’s superiority on air, sea, and land doesn’t really play here because this plot is so far-fetched, so clearly the realm of comic book fantasy. It’s difficult to see this film for what it is, a ridiculously expensive recruitment ad, when the climax involves the villain’s twin nuclear bases which are situated next to an underwater volcanic trench—I mean, we are in straight up Roger Moore Bond movie territory here!
On one hand, I lament the loss of the Dante Lam who made movies like Fire of Conscience and The Sniper: smaller, self-contained tales in which hardened criminals and steely-nerved cops clashed on the fringes of Hong Kong society. Sure, he wasn’t reinventing the wheel with material like that, but Lam knew how to make the old hard-boiled stories sing. On the other hand, I have to give Lam his due: when the opening titles for Operational Hadal flash to indicate Lam served as storywriter, action designer, and director on this military epic, you realize there are very few working filmmakers who could have marshaled such a massive production with as much gusto as Lam displays here. I’m over here mourning Dante Lam’s former career, but as the torpedoes fire and the explosions trigger and the might of the Chinese military carries the day, you have to consider: perhaps Dante Lam is right where he wants to be.
Z Ravas’ Rating: 6/10
Post 2016 Dante Lam makes Michael Bay movies look like mumblecore. Have no idea why Well Go picks up these shitty movies when there much better stuff being released in China. How about releasing Dear You which is still playing in theaters over there.
I’m inclined to agree with you: I had the same thought, that the audience for this movie in North America is going to be incredibly niche and the distributor would have likely benefitted from selecting a more widely appealing film. Also, the line “Post 2016 Dante Lam makes Michael Bay movies look like mumblecore” is hilarious…and quite true!