Blue Lightning
Director: Raymond Lee
Year: 1991
Rating: 5.5
A quiz for Hong Kong film fans. What do you think
Danny Lee plays in this film? No. You would be wrong. He is not a cop. Instead,
a retired cop. Asked to leave because he was in the habit of using excessive
force. Isn't Excessive Force Lee's middle name. These days of course, he
would be asked to join. How things have changed. But Yat (Lee) is now out
of the force, divorced from his very busty wife, an absent father and a drunk.
A bit of a stretch for Danny. A good set-up for what follows though director
Raymond Lee (Dragon Inn, The East is Red) doesn't give it the urgency that
it needs. Yat's ex-wife and her lover are murdered by a professional killer
and his small son Lim (Huang Kun-hsuen - All About Ah Long) witnesses it
and barely escapes with his life.
The cops are so sympathetic - "Stop crying
you baby and give us a description" and later when they drop him off with
his drunk father, they tell him, "You will get used to it". Yat is a terrible
father - drunk as a skunk most of the time - uncaring - tells the boy that
he is glad his mother is dead. Not Father of the Year material. But of course,
that is a necessary build for when they begin to bond which brings the film
to a halting screeching stop. They even have a song play over their father-son
bonding. Hey, later folks - you have a killer out there who knows the boy
recognizes him. And played by rough looking Lee Siu-kay, you could recognize
him in the dark.
The cop on the case is played by Tony Leung
Ka-fai - a by the book cop who treats informers with kid gloves. After Lim
asks dad to please find the killer of his mother, Yat gets off the hootch
and starts beating up people. Yes, that is the Danny Lee we want to see.
Enough of this drunken self-pity nonsense. Or you can just wait for them
to come to you which inevitably they do. A few nice shoot-ups within - but
way too much father-son relationship stuff. Still, this is an instance where
the child actor did not annoy me - and he is tough - once getting thrown
through a car windshield, jumping off a fire escape and leaping off a bus.
Also, in this is Olivia Cheng as the friend of the dead wife, Victor Han-kwan
as the informer and Lau Siu-ming as the fellow who seems to be behind it
all. Fairly standard cop film but a few surprises.
