If 2008’s The Beast Stalker marked out Dante Lam as a go-to director for expensive, high-concept modern-day thrillers, this year’s Fire Of Conscience handily cements his reputation. Shockingly loud and chock full of chases and smashes, gunplay and grenades, Lam’s latest dark epic screams out for the big-screen cinema experience.
Leon Lai stars as Manfred, a plainclothes cop who’s living out of a car and mourning the recent death of his wife. He’s hard up and hurting, but not slacking off when it comes to police work. Once a sex-worker murder case crops up, Manfred leaps into action and teams up with Inspector Kee, a flashy, luxury-car-driving officer who hides a tough edge behind easygoing looks. Kee doesn’t seem like he’s headed along the straight and narrow, however, and colleague Cheung-on (Liu Kai-chi) is also starting to act suspicious too. When the stakes rise dramatically with the arrival of gun runners and mainland Chinese killers, Manfred must deal with fellow officers and come to grips with the torment of loss and revenge before he can think of saving the day.
As a policier, Fire Of Conscience is no upbeat celebration of life on the force. Its web of crime sees cops driven to corruption, cover-ups and other evils, and they often work in ways far removed from the moral standards expected of them. Police brutality spirals (even “good” cops are waterboarding suspects); one colleague’s fears of loss of face have him tamper with evidence. Come the finale, the filmmakers suggest that there’s a sickness in everyone primed to explode, and the traditional festivities that feature around then commemorate, suitably enough, a legend of 1880s villagers using a fire dragon to overcome the plague.
Jack Ng’s dense screenplay does the trick for a fast-moving action structure, though it cannot match the clearly focused drive of The Beast Stalker’s script. Ng and Lam let in too many principal characters, each with little room to grow on viewers.
But when the guns come out, accelerators are stamped on and the grenades go off, Fire Of Conscience offers a riveting cinema, each thrill setting the scene for fresh ones soon to follow. Action directors Chin Kar-lok and Wong Wai-fai provide nods to genre classics (an outrageous teahouse shootout in particular), and the stakes are high for cops and killers alike, whether on the ground or clinging to high-rises. Set pieces pile on the drama, like a hit man being emotionally blackmailed into an explosive heist, and the action often spills into crowded city streets. But such audacity should come as no surprise: right from its bold opening, with CGI-enhanced freeze frames of crime and chaos, Fire Of Conscience signals an intent to go overboard in charging up the audience.
Tim Youngs