The Raid

 

Director: Ching Siu-tung; Tsui Hark
Year: 1991
Rating: 7.0

I saw some postings in the Asian Movie Newsgroup (anyone remember that?) that made this sound like a promising film and upon tracking it down it definitely turned out to be a splendid little action flick. Like the old movie serials, it is full of preposterous escapes, rescues and mile a minute action.



Dean Shek is like a geriatric Indiana Jones as he plays Dr. Choy (an old Chinese comic character in the 1930’s) and always shows up just in time to save the day. Here he joins up with a small rebel army group who are trying to find the whereabouts of a poison gas factory that the Manchurian Emperor is building. The Emperor though is just a puppet for two Japanese militarists – Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Joyce Godenza.



This film has some great action scenes. My two favorites are when Shek is dangling from a rope from the face of a dam and a plane is trying to shoot him down. He uses dynamite to blow a hole in the dam and the gushing water knocks the plane out of the air. Then later there is a scene where the ninjas fly in on the wings of propeller planes and jump off into the fight below whereupon Shek cuts them to pieces with his sword. Jacky Cheung, Fennie Yuen and Chu Kong are also on hand to fight the villains. And on top of all this is a nice little musical show number!  One posting mentioned that this film bombed in HK which is unfortunate because it has sequel written all over it. It was produced by Tsui Hark.