Chasing the Dragon

The year 1963. Ho Kwun-cheong crosses illegally from the mainland into Hong Kong. He has nothing. He works on building sites and is soon in street fights. In one clash he is shot in the leg and left lame; from then on he is known as Crippled Ho. In the same period a police inspector called Lee Rock is building an order of his own: he takes a share of the drug trade and turns it into a system. The two men come to terms. Ho takes over the drug trade and Rock protects him. Then an anti corruption body is set up. Wong Jing and Jason Kwan direct. Donnie Yen plays Ho and Andy Lau plays Rock; Kent Cheng is in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. The characters rest on real people; both Crippled Ho and Lee Rock figured in Hong Kong's corruption cases of the seventies. Andy Lau had played the same police character in another film series in the nineties and returns to the part here. The matter it treats is the colonial order; the relation between police and criminal organisation is shown as a structure rather than an exception. The Kowloon Walled City of the period was rebuilt for the production and the location works inside the narrative. Donnie Yen's character is not a fighting star; the narrative carries him as a crippled man after he loses the use of his leg. Its limit is viewpoint; the narrative does not criticise its characters and makes the violence stylish. Who it is for: viewers who like Hong Kong crime films and period productions. Who it is not for: the violence is explicit, it runs long, and the history is romanticised.