This poster is terrible, gives no sense of the flick whatsoever
(九龍城寨之圍城
九龙城寨之围城
Jiǔ Lóng Chéng Zhài·Wéi Chéng)
dir: Soi Cheang
2024
It brought me a strange joy to watch this movie.
I am not, despite my abject mawkishness and the fact that the slightest thing can bring me to tears, whether it’s a tv commercial or any pet rescue video online, an overly sentimental person. I don’t revel in nostalgia. That doesn’t mean I don’t think of the past, all the time. I am as much a prisoner of the past as the rest of us are.
But I never indulge along the lines of “Things were so much better back *insert unspecified time when you were younger*. The movies were better, the music was better, sex and drugs were better, everything back then was better. If only we could return to…”
With little variation, plenty of things were terrible for plenty of people back whenever you choose to pick. If the music back then was great, I can listen to it at will now. If there were great films back whenever, in a lot of cases I can just stream them at will too. At every time that there was great stuff coming out, there was plenty of absolute crap.
For every great Hong Kong film I ever watched, there were a hundred mediocre pieces of shit that came out as well. I don’t want to return to the late 80s early 90s at all. I certainly don’t want the world to go forty years backwards. Think of how terrible the internet was back then. You want to go back to dial-up modems? Well, do ya?
But even I can’t help feeling a deep nostalgia while watching this flick, which I’m going to truncate to Walled In for the purposes of this review.
The place this flick pretends to be about no longer exists. Unlike the great cities of yore that are nothing but dust now, or infamous places where feet dread to step, the Walled so-called City in Kowloon existed within living memory, for weird reasons, and its destruction is also not that long ago, happening several years before Britain handed back Hong Kong to China in 1997.
It should never have controlled Hong Kong, because, in case you haven’t noticed, colonialism brings misery and wealth-extraction wherever it goes, and is bad. Britain’s control of Hong Kong is especially awful, since its occupation started with the Opium Wars.
You know, those wars where the Chinese said “please, we don’t want that crap, it’s killing us”, and the British Empire said “you will take our opium and you will love it, bitches”, enforced of course through many cannons making many Chinese people be unalived. The remnants of the Qing Dynasty ceded control of that island referred to as Hong Kong, but as a “fuck you” designated an area for there to be a fort and an official residence for an official to sit in his office and glare at them through the window.
That place was one place the British couldn’t do anything about, and the Chinese couldn’t really do anything from there either, and it existed in a legal limbo which allowed eventually for an unholy agglomeration of slums to pile on slums and make it one of the most densely populated places on Earth. No, I didn’t know all this off the top of my head. Yes, I did look up that at some point there were like 30,000 people living in something the size of a city block, hence the city within a city idea.
I have seen so many references to it, not least of which in the science fiction writing of authors like William Gibson and Neil Stephenson, but there also used to be a whole bunch of films there, as well as the borrowing of imagery of it. I don’t know how it came to epitomise the denseness, the feel, the texture of an alternate Chinese / Guangzhou / Cantonese place in the modern era aesthetic, but it did, down to it being used in countless movies and media, even in other Asian media. Because of its proximity to the airport anyone that every flew anywhere from Australia to Europe or elsewhere in Asia, at a certain time if you weren’t going to Hong Kong specifically, you still stopped over there (if it wasn’t Singapore), for hours if not a day, and it was one of the first and last places you saw before your plane either landed or took off.
So it’s a strange thrill seeing the place remade through CGI, and practically, as well, since a lot of the film takes place in a place that doesn’t exist that, surely, no longer has any contemporary equivalents, at least no longer in Hong Kong.
Also, one of my favourite moments in the flick has the protagonist, if he really is the protagonist, building a model of the place with mah-jong tiles, to inspire him to go back and wreak his vengeance.
This obviously is a period piece of multiple parts. I don’t mean it’s set in multiple chronologies, I just mean it’s mostly set in like 1980. Even given that, and I’m not an expert on this, a lot of the look is pretty much the 1960s. I am basing this solely on the carefully coiffured look of Hong Kong superstar Louis Koo, who is not an aging matinee idol from the 60s but is made to look like one.
He is Cyclone, and many years before he helped some other guy out by winning a war against another triad clan, which meant a whole lot of people got butchered. Slaughtered like hogs. He may be the unofficial ruler of the Walled City, or a barber, or both, but he pays rent for the whole nasty place to Some Guy.
That Guy (Richie Jen), in that precipitating event that is now legend, had his family slaughtered. He wants revenge against the guy who butchered his family back then. That guy is dead, possibly at Cyclone’s hand, but the White Haired Guy is no less angry despite the passage of time.
There is some other triad boss Mr Big (Hong Kong legend Sammo Hung) who really doesn’t like Cyclone, despite the fact that they’re somewhat friends, and who plots to take over the Walled City for his own reasons. Despite clearly being in his 80s, and probably taking hits of oxygen in between sitting on some mobility aid (time has not been kind to this former grandmaster of kung fu delights), he fights, or at least his stunt person and a lot of CGI, formidably.
He also has a guy who is purest 80s (given the impressive mullet wig they put on him) as an underling who often emits a high pitched giggle which is supremely fucking annoying. Anyone with a longstanding appreciation of Hong Kong films knows that this a signal that the guy will be a monstrous fighter and the last to die, despite how pathetic and irritating he might seem.
Plot. All of what I’m describing is plot. Plot is “this happens because of this, and then this happens, and then this happens”. Plot is never really that interesting. The first part of the flick, the first half hour, doesn’t have plot, though It establishes two things: there’s this refugee who sneaks into Hong Kong via boat who fucks up and ends up in the Walled City. Being a refugee, after initially fucking up, he makes amends, works hard, and learns to love his adoptive home.
I feel like screaming it from the rooftops “THIS IS WHAT REFUGEES DO, POTATO HEAD DUTTON!”, but that’s just me screaming into the void or preaching to the converted. And plus I’m not so delusional that I think the dishonourable Leader of the Opposition of our wide brown land would ever read one of my reviews. It’s not as if Peter “African Gangs” Dutton has time to spare in between dogwhistles and condemning the Palestinians to extermination.
While this is meant to be nostalgic, it’s not overly romantic in its depiction of life there in Hak Nam (City of Darkness, another name for the place). That’s why I keep referring to the half-hour mark: just in case we thought it was all dumplings and maotai liquor: a woman is beaten to death by her abusive partner, and her body dumped onto the cables and awnings that infest the place.
If he’s our hero, Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is the one who brings her body down, and also the one who seeks to punish the fuckhead who did this. But on his way to exact justice, he meets up with other chaps sent by Cyclone to exact vengeance.
This is known as a bonding exercise.
Up until this moment, as much as I loathed the scene where the poor woman is beaten to death, I was as happy as I was going to be with this flick. Once it sets off on its next track, being the two biggest obsessions of Hong Kong cinema: revenge and property values, not necessarily in that order of priority, which is both entertaining and very melodramatic, I remembered thinking “you really didn’t need to go this way.”
Because, don’t you know, the guy who we thought was a refugee is really the son of the guy who murdered blah blah and who now everyone wants to kill because blah blah.
I do not care for such fuckery, but I do care about watching a return to the glory days of Hong Kong fighting on screen. On the one hand, it’s glaring to see the differences: much more heavily edited, lots more CGI, less wirework, less overall virtuosity or sustained choreography. On the other hand, well, aren’t there enough of those classic flicks? And now that people like Donnie Yen get to do the same thing they were doing before, except they’re paid a 100 times more and have to do far less in Star Wars films or John Wick movies, does it matter?
Yes, yes it does. Raymond Lam, who I don’t think I’ve seen in anything else, is too old to be playing a young upstart in this, where he’s meant to be playing a 20 year old or something similar, but he’s fine in the role, and looks incredible in his many fights. As supports to him some of the guys loyal to Cyclone like Shin (Terrence Lau), AV (German Cheung) and Twelfth Master (Tony Wu) range from awesome to okay. Shin is awesome, possibly outshining Lok-kwan. And he already has the “you’re like a son to me” dynamic with Cyclone, well before the flick wedges in the exact same themes for different reasons later on.
As for Louis Koo as Cyclone, well, he fucking nails the part like he often does. All he needs to do is smoke heaps and look cool as fuck, and he’s got that down to a fine art. As the benevolent patriarch of this fucked up place, but tight-knit, welcoming community, well, again, I’m tearing up for a place I never lived in and would have probably hated.
But that’s the magic of cinema, eh? I think I loved this flick, probably mostly because it made me long for a time when I used to go to the Chinatown cinemas and watch a double bill while being laughed at by the staff or other patrons who were generally from the places these flicks usually depicted, and for those films themselves, many of which were terrible, many of which were sublime. And I do miss what Hong Kong used to be or represent before the takeover, because there’s one thing totalitarian states don’t do is fuck around. Which is why life in Hong Kong, despite or because of its wealth, is not as free a place to live and breathe now, perversely, as before.
So, yes, despite clearly not being the audience for this flick, it ironically hits me deep in the feels because of my own history of HK fandom, and though a melodramatic mess that’s all over the place, it worked perfectly for me or on me, take your pick.
8 times there’s a reason flicks like this aren’t made any more in Hong Kong out of 10
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“”I’m warning you, don’t cause trouble in the Walled City.” – if he listened to you, there’d be no film, you know - Twilight of the Heroes: Walled In
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2786182681/?playlistId=tt20316748
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