Ringo Lam Ling-tung (1955-2018) was a prolific Hong Kong film director, producer and screenwriter, whose best works, such as City on Fire (1987), put stunts and stark, unstylised violence to the fore. Although enmeshed in the local Hong Kong industry, his films were frequently critical of the city. He often looked abroad to America throughout his 33-year directing career, making three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies there. But if the martial arts used across his films were mixed, the reviews were even more so. Lam started out by joining the actors training programme run by Hong Kong broadcaster TVB in 1973, on which he met Chow Yun-fat – who would later star in several of his films – before becoming the assistant of legendary producer Wong Tin-lam. He befriended Tsui Hark, already a director at TVB, and the pair would watch black-and-white films together. “They were always in German, Russian, French, and we would never understand what they were about,” he confessed to Asian film site Eastern Kicks. “Visually, it was really interesting though.” After a stint in Toronto studying film, he returned to Hong Kong, where Hark offered him a job, and began directing comedies such as Esprit D’Amour (1983). The success of Mad Mission 4: You Never Die Twice (1986) bought him creative freedom which, tellingly, he used to make cop thriller City of Fire – that most American of genres. “At first I didn’t know what to film,” he told The L Magazine . “Eventually I decided that I enjoyed the realistic aspects of The French Connection and that I wanted to create a film containing similar grit.” Grit would not be in short supply in City on Fire . Chow Yun-fat plays an undercover cop who finds his loyalties torn between a cruel new police regime and the criminal gang he infiltrates. Though conversant with Hollywood history – hence the film noir saxophone score – it has a hectic quality that’s all Hong Kong, and won Hong Kong Film Awards statues for its director and star. 10 must-see movies at the Macau film festival, all available online The equally cynical, but otherwise unrelated, Prison on Fire (1987) and School on Fire (1988) followed soon after. Quentin Tarantino might have borrowed City of Fire ’s plot and key moments for Reservoir Dogs (1992), but Lam could hardly complain: his Wild Search (1989) was a remake of Peter Weir’s Witness (1985) in all but name. After terrorist thriller Undeclared War (1990), Lam’s first international co-production, the cartoony Full Contact (1992) saw him rejecting the righteous rage of his earlier work. “People had threatened to chop me up, accused me of having wrong political views, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with those things,” he told the Hong Kong Film Archive. “I wanted to make a film with a style no one could put a finger on.” In a clear case of be careful what you wish for, Lam’s first Hollywood director-for-hire gig Maximum Risk (1996) is tonally all over the place. With a budget he could only dream of back home, and a willing but limited star in Jean Claude Van Damme – playing twins, no less – the film hops from France to America, with Van Damme #1 trying to establish who’s responsible for killing Van Damme #2. After a lengthy fruit cart chase, Van Damme #2 dies when his head meets an oncoming car windscreen. “His death was not an easy one,” muses Van Damme #1’s pal, with some understatement. Though the film entertains as a Friday night fight flick, it’s only in the vehicular mayhem that you can see Lam’s directorial stamp. This element was pushed even further in the full-throttle action thriller Full Alert (1997), a return to form and Hong Kong. Unfortunately, his next two American efforts were less successful. The eccentric Replicant (2001) stars Van Damme as the genetic clone of a serial killer (also Van Damme) who’s drafted in to help dogged cop Michael Rooker solve the case. Mostly this involves Rooker dragging him around on a leash and shouting “sit!”, though there’s also a tone-deaf scene where Van Damme attacks a sex worker (Marnie Alton), who forgives him because he’s a virgin. If Replicant was disappointing, the Russia-set In Hell (2003) was dismal. After shooting the man who murdered his wife (poor Alton again), Van Damme is sent to prison, where slit throats and sexual assaults are commonplace, and the inmates are forced to fight each other for the entertainment of the guards, if nobody else. It’s a shame, but unsurprising, that Lam’s international career stalled here. After a lengthy break from directing that saw him only contribute to the three-part anthology film Triangle (2007) in over a decade, he would go on to make two more films in Hong Kong: Wild City (2015) and Sky on Fire (2016). In retrospect he was clear-sighted about what Hong Kong directors could bring to the international arena, even if he never quite managed it. “You can never outgun Hollywood in terms of CGI technology, but real action and stunts were always our forte, our winning streak,” he remarked in an interview with Film Comment magazine. “In Hong Kong film’s heyday, we made a brand name for our authentic, cutting-edge action sequences: we were selling the sense of realism and the feeling of genuine danger, not computer graphics. Looking back, Hong Kong movies in the ’80s redefined the action genre worldwide. It was a breakthrough because of our uniqueness.” In 2015, that uniqueness was recognised at the New York Asian Film Festival, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award . “I feel like, the people here, they can understand me more than the people back in Hong Kong,” he told Eastern Kicks, bucking against the system to the last. He died three years later , aged 63. In this monthly feature series exploring Asia’s impact on international cinema, we examine how the continent’s directors have fared in Hollywood, whether its most popular films survived the remake process – and at what cost. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook