Mercenaries From Hong Kong

Lovingly restored from the original negative so that it can be appreciated in all its glory, this 1982 Shaw Bros. romp has everything you could want from an OTT martial arts actioner. It centres on Lo Lik (Lung Ti), a tough guy with a strong sense of honour who has a past smuggling medicines to revels in Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia and whom we first see beating up two men who have drugged and are about to assault a young woman. This isn’t just a public service – it’s revenge for the rape and murder of his 15-year-old niece – but one of the dead men was a well-connected gangster, and now half the city is out for Lo Lik’s blood. What he needs is a well connected patron who can make it all go away.

Enter Miss Lo (Candice Yu). She’s the daughter of a recently deceased wealthy industrialist, and wants to hire our hero to assassinate her father’s killer, Naiwen ‘the Devil’ (Phillip Ko), who is hiding out in Cambodia with his brother, who happens to be an old acquaintance of Lo Lik’s as he heads one of the rebel factions there. The mission also requires the recovery of an audio tape which Miss Lo is being blackmailed with. The money being offered is persuasive, as is Miss Lo’s inclination to mix business with pleasure, but to pull it off, Lo Lik knows that he will need to get his old gang back together.

This is a gang which will tick all the right boxes for genre fans. It includes two Vietnam veterans (an angry chef and a ladies’ man who is in trouble with an angry husband), a sharp shooter whose young daughter needs a kidney transplant, an explosives expert and a trickster working in Hong Kong as a stage musician. A good portion of the film is spent on finding them, and every bit of it entertaining, delivering on both comedy and action. Lo Lik, naturally, is the leader, if for no other reason than that he’s good at jumping over or through things on his motorbike (even a big pile of boxes in the middle of the road fails to stop him). All that remains is for them to acquire matching tracksuits, work through a training montage and get on their way.

Of course, nothing goes quite to plan. There are traps and ambushes to be negotiated en route to White Snake Town, where undercover work is complicated by the presence of a second, rival rebel faction in the area. There is also, as is par for the course in such tales, a series of double crosses to deal with and mysteries to be unravelled. Violence plays a part in most of these, and it’s always spectacularly delivered. The sets are cleverly designed for maximum jumping and swinging potential, guns are deftly misplaced so as to keep scenes from ending too quickly, and innovative use is made of a variety of everyday objects when no other weapons are available. A good balance of group fights and one-to-ones provides variety, keeping things interesting.

The film is very much of its time, and some aspects haven’t aged as well. It includes a joke about a trans woman which plays to a tired old trope, but for what it’s worth, it’s actually quite sympathetic towards the woman, to the point where one wonders if she’s just winding the male character up, and he’s the one who comes out of it looking like an idiot. Less sympathy is shown towards women who sleep around, although the men are quite happy to aid and abet them, as it were. Of course, the whole film is saturated with homoerotic tension, right from the opening shots, but what happens in Hong Kong stays in Hong Kong, right?

Rattling along at a fantastic pace, Mercenaries From Hong Kong is a richly entertaining piece of work from a master of the trade, getting its post-restoration première at the Fantasia International Film Festival. It’s brimming over with talent and director Jing Wong knows exactly how to use it. If you’re looking for action, this is where you’ll find it.