Hired Guns
     
            
Director: Chung Gwok-yan
Year:  1981
Rating: 7.0
Here is another obscure Golden Harvest film filled with nearly all unknown actors and a director I have never heard of. I almost passed it up because of that but am glad I didn't. It is an in your face crime film that is like a grimier glummer 87th Precinct as we bounce back and forth between the cops, the killers and the cop's family. There is no glamor here - it all takes place in the gritty back streets of Hong Kong and is shot with a rough abruptness. The lower class low level parts of Hong Kong filled with tiny restaurants, outside food stalls selling fish balls and squid, people playing mahjong on the sidewalks, apartment houses that looked ready to be condemned fifty years prior, betting parlors, cheap hotels, small squalid brothels and a mass of humanity sweating away their days making a living - sometimes legally, often times not.







Trying to keep an eye on them are the cops - a squad headed by Inspector Goony who may be the least attractive lead man in any Hong Kong film I have seen. Played by Addy Sung with his balding head, bad squint and a face that looks like it got caught in a compressor when he was young. I have spotted him in lots of films in small parts - always as a bad guy but here he is given the heroic lead and though his acting is edgy, a little amateurish and rough, he is mesmerizing to watch - all tics and energy. It begins in one of those small three table restaurants - a cop is sitting with a civilian telling him that he doesn't carry a gun because it is safer that way. Not on this day. A second later two men walk into the place and shoot him in the head and calmly walk away. Jump to Goony who along with his partner and friend Ah Nam (Chung Nga-naam) are trying to disarm a man with a knife to a woman's throat. Jump to some punks in a brothel who have watched The Warriors too many times with their baseball bats and white painted faces. Jump to a gang fight that breaks up a police stake-out.






But these are just the appetizers that lead up to the main story when the two killers at the beginning meet two other killers from Holland (Phillip Ko and Man Ding-goh aka Mandingo). They are out to kill cops on the orders of the Big Boss in prison. The cops or their families. It gets fairly intense. The director is Chung Gwok-yan who is a complete unknown to me but based on this film I would like to see some of his others. The film is not slick, has a few narrative lapses but I love how gritty it is and how it digs deep into Hong Kong. He has directed fifteen other films - none of which I have heard of but with titles like Double Cross, Vice Squad, Payoff, Sweet Vengeance, Hong Kong Butcher and Bloody Mission I sure would like to. Maybe he needs a re-discovery.