How Ringo Lam crime thriller Full Alert mixed realistic action on Hong Kong streets with premonition of 1997 handover

Full Alert was made in 1997, and the crime film was a comment on the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, showing scenes from the city during that time

A car chase was filmed ‘guerilla style’ on the open streets of Hong Kong with no filming permits, and looks incredibly realistic as a result

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Lau Ching-wan hunting down an escaped robber in the mean streets (Bird Street) of Mong Kok in Ringo Lam’s 1997 movie Full Alert.

Published: 5:15am, 29 May 2022Updated: 3:05pm, 17 Jun 2022

Ringo Lam Ling-tung, who died in 2018, made his name with the gritty crime story City on Fire in 1987, and quickly gained a reputation for directing well-scripted crime films with realistic action scenes.

Full Alert, which was made in 1997 after Lam’s brief sojourn in Hollywood, is one of his best-loved films, and sets two of the era’s biggest stars, Lau Ching-wan and Francis Ng Chun-yu, against each other in a character-driven story about a heist.

Lam also intended Full Alert to be a quiet comment on the handover, and many of the scenes were shot to document life in the city just before Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty. The film was Lam’s last thoroughbred crime film until 2015’s Wild City, and marked the end of a prolific era in his career.

“He saw the movie as a memorial for the Hong Kong where he grew up and lived, and in some ways you could see it as a memorial to his career,” says film historian and novelist Grady Hendrix, author of These Fists Break Bricks.

Lam made sure there was a surfeit of action to accompany the drama, and he included a beautifully staged car chase, and a complex underwater sequence which features connecting tunnels.

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