Millionaires' Express

A town in northern China at the start of the twentieth century. A swindler named Ching Fong-tin plans to stop a luxury train in his home town to revive it; if the passengers stay at the hotel the town makes money. But bandits, Japanese agents, Russian soldiers and an assortment of armed men are after the same train. It ends in a fight that takes over the entire town. Sammo Hung directs and stars. The cast is extraordinarily large: Yuen Biao, Rosamund Kwan, Cynthia Rothrock, Richard Norton, Yukari Oshima, and more or less everyone working in Hong Kong cinema at the time appears somewhere. The idea is to mix genres. Inside one structure there is a western, kung fu, a war film, comedy and a heist, and the town set is deliberately built like a western town. The event is the mass fight in the last half hour. With dozens of fighters working simultaneously, it is regarded as one of the most ambitious pieces of choreography in Hong Kong action. Sammo Hung's method is visible here too: a conception of fighting built on speed and timing despite his size, and a camera kept inside the fight. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties Hong Kong action and large ensemble fight films. Who it is not for: the plot is scattered, there are more characters than anyone can track, and the comedy is coarse.