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» » Jiang hu jie ban ren (1988)

Short summary

When Lee Sam, a ten-year veteran of the Hong Kong underworld, is released from prison, he dispatches two enemies and goes into hiding in Taipei where his old friend Billy is a boss. Billy is a hothead whose rivalries with other gangs put Sam at risk. After bailing Billy out a couple of times, Sam tries to get out of the Mob life. He retires to the coastal town of Tainam, works as a fishmonger, and falls in love with the sister of Crow, a 20-year-old who wants to work for Billy. Can Sam quit violence for good, start a family, and protect Crow?

User reviews


  • comment
    • Author: Wrathshaper
    Max Mok performs well as a rising wanna-be triad thug, however the material falls short to deliver any punch to his dialogue. Other characters around him are flat, thus the audience's connection with the movie dwindles. A mediocre Heroic Bloodshed movie of the era, it fails to excite or maintain interest past the few fights. Max Mok and his partner on the street, Wing-Ching Cheung, try to slowly climb up the Triad ladder to make bigger bucks with higher stakes illegal operations. Cheung is a gambling addict however, and when massive debt befalls onto him, Mok as his partner takes equal responsibility for such debt. A Triad boss is much too aggressive to allow both Mok and Cheung alive, in which the movie follows Mok's consequential tragedy and vengeance to kill the Triad boss. If your running out of films to explore in the Heroic Bloodshed genre, it's an average revenge film to watch. Personally with the exception of the last 10 minutes I felt it to be mostly bland, but the conclusion to Max's plight has one hell of a "bang". Let's just say this might win the medal for the most amount of squibs used on one actor, a Swiss cheese death sequence will end the movie on a high note. Besides this one flash-bang moment though, the film is overall unmemorable. 3/10
  • comment
    • Author: Mavegar
    Since the large economic success of John Woo's A BETTER TOMORROW there is no want of imitations, resulting in a genre unique to Hong Kong cinema - "Heroic Bloodshed", for which a "code of honour" possessed by Triad thugs becomes the spine of a profitable formulary as gangsters are shown to be just as loyal to their friends as they are pitiless to enemies, with this melodrama being a rather typical example of the species. In this instance, the honourable Triad member is Lee Sam (Miu Kiu Wai), freshly released following a three year prison stretch who, after exacting violent vengeance upon those responsible for his stay behind bars, has fled for his safety to Taipei, where he reluctantly goes to work for Billy, an erstwhile confederate but, after saving the latter's skin in several instances, Sam decides to retire from the Triad way of life and becomes a commercial fisherman. At this point, the storyline emphasis segues to young Crow (Mok Siu Chung, with the film's best performance), a betel nut street seller outside of Billy's Taiwan headquarters who longs to become a Triad boss, but after a stint as a low level runner, he is faced with an untenable plight because Billy lusts for Crow's girlfriend, and only Sam will be able to aid him. Hong Kong's Tai Sing Studio has spawned many works in similar vein, and this piece manages to include virtually every cliché common to the ilk, a posture that a solution to a moral dilemma can be found only through violence being merely one of its most prominent flaws, with the DVD version highlighting others, including erratic sound editing, grotesquely inaccurate English subtitles for the Mandarin dialogue along with a meaningful but untranslated portion of text employed for an early scene shift.
  • Credited cast:
    Siu Chung Mok Siu Chung Mok - Crow Yeung Tin-Shun
    Kiu Wai Miu Kiu Wai Miu - Lee Sam
    Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
    Philip Chan Philip Chan - Crow's Target
    Yung-Cheng Chang Yung-Cheng Chang - Little Shantung
    Jing Chen Jing Chen - Hood with Moustache
    Sung Young Chen Sung Young Chen - Big Ma
    May Chin May Chin - Yeung Lai-Ling
    Ka-Kui Ho Ka-Kui Ho - Billy
    Blackie Shou Liang Ko Blackie Shou Liang Ko - Peter
    Feng Ku Feng Ku - Uncle Chung
    Ming-Chie Kuang Ming-Chie Kuang
    Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok - Big B (as Philip Kwok)
    Chung Lam Chung Lam
    Foo-Wai Lam Foo-Wai Lam
    Chun-Hung Liu Chun-Hung Liu
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