Review | Film review: Chasing the Dragon – Donnie Yen, Andy Lau play notorious criminals Crippled Ho, Lee Rock in slanted biopic
More a showcase for Yen’s acting chops than a biopic of the real-life Hong Kong gangster – and one in which Andy Lau plays second fiddle as the crooked policeman – Wong Jing’s film is sanitised, shameless and a solid gangster tale
3/5 stars
By now, it’s less an urban legend than a conclusion drawn from empirical observation: neither Donnie Yen Ji-dan nor Andy Lau Tak-wah – two of Hong Kong cinema’s biggest stars – is enamoured with playing bad guys at this stage of their careers. (Disclosure: I once got a stare from Lau by mentioning his tendency to play heroes.) But if you are holding your breath for them to make a U-turn in this gangster epic, think again.
Of course, the true-life drug lord Crippled Ho (real name Ng Sik-ho) and corrupt police sergeant Lee Rock (originally Lui Lok) have already been brought vividly to life on the big screen in the early 1990s: actor Ray Lui Leung-wai portrayed Ho as a Godfather-esque figure in the brashly immoral classic To Be Number One (1991), while a young Lau memorably played the titular bad police officer in a pair of Wong Jing-produced films, Lee Rock and Lee Rock II, in the same year.
But Chasing the Dragon – the title refers to the slang term for smoking heroin – is a far cry from those earlier films, which smugly revelled in their own depravity. Co-directed by writer-producer Wong and veteran cinematographer Jason Kwan Chi-yiu ( A Nail Clipper Romance ), it is such a sanitised – not to say heavily fictionalised – account of organised crime that its lead protagonists hardly qualify as anti-heroes.
Yen may look nothing like the real-life Crippled Ho, but he has made this film his own with his larger-than-life reimagination of the mobster as an improbably moralistic man. A penniless Chaozhou native who fled to Hong Kong with several of his “brothers” in the 1960s, Ho (Yen) is given a somewhat easier rite of passage than in the 1991 film, as he swiftly becomes one of the city’s most influential drug dealers.