Lau Ching-wan’s best mid-1990s Hong Kong films, from Loving You to Big Bullet

Lau Ching-wan is easily one of Hong Kong’s finest dramatic actors, winning four best actor trophies at the Hong Kong Film Awards over the past 20 years. Several of Lau’s mid-1990s roles strongly hinted at the greatness to come. Below, we revisit some of his best performances from this period after he first hit the big time with Derek Yee Tung-sing’s C’est La Vie, Mon Cheri in 1993. Loving You (1995) This action romance was a turning point for director Johnnie To Kei-fung, marking a move from commercial fare to what would become his crime works of the late 1990s. Although Loving You still plays to the crowd, To allows some of his offbeat ideas to surface. In the first of numerous leading roles for To, Lau’s performance in this film also foreshadows the stage presence, idiosyncrasies and superior technique that would turn him into one of Hong Kong’s top actors in the years that followed. He plays Lau Chun-hoi, a grumpy police inspector known for being mean to friend and foe alike. The first half of the film plays out like a procedural, with Chun-hoi getting drunk after a botched surveillance job and having sex with a prostitute. After his wife (Carman Lee Yeuk-tung) decides to leave him over his drunken antics, he takes a bullet to the head during an arrest – and miraculously survives. Feeling like he has been given a second chance, Chun-hoi decides to reform himself, seeking to treat his colleagues fairly and his wife lovingly. But his attempted killer has escaped from prison and is out for revenge. “Lau Ching-wan invests Chun-hoi with more nuance and intensity than the role probably possessed on paper,” wrote SCMP critic Paul Fonoroff. Lau does not follow any of the usual stereotypes. He portrays Chun-hoi as a misfit, but the character is not goofy – he is good at his job, brave and deeply cares for his colleagues, although he does not show it. He also loves his wife, but the pressures of police work have come between them. A small part of the story zeroes in on the fact that the bullet in his head has led to a loss of smell and taste – odd little details like this would become magnified in To and Lau’s later collaborations. This idea was the genesis of the whole film. It was based on the true story of a police inspector in Hong Kong who survived a similar head wound while pursuing armed robbers in Tai Kok Tsui in 1992. He returned to work and earned the nickname “The Tasteless Detective” – which To directly used in the film’s Chinese title. Big Bullet (1996) The well-regarded Big Bullet marked director Benny Chan Muk-sing’s first major foray into massive set pieces, and it quickly established him as a top-rate action director. That might not have happened without Lau in the leading role. Big Bullet is certainly an effective, hard-hitting police drama, but it does not do anything new story-wise. It succeeds because Lau and the ensemble cast – including Francis Ng Chun-yu, Anthony Wong Chau-sang and Jordan Chan Siu-chun – inject a lot of thoughtfulness and fun into their stock police characters. Sometimes known as EU Strike Force, the film features Lau as Bill Chu, another hot-headed officer in his repertoire of angry policemen. After attacking his superior officer over a botched arrest that injured his colleagues, Bill is moved from the plain-clothes Serious Crimes Unit to the uniformed Emergency Unit, a kind of glorified street patrol. Conflict arises with the upstanding Jeff (Chan), who is a stickler for the rules – something Bill certainly is not. “To get into the character was quite simple,” Lau told this writer. “I just pretended to do his job and I became him.” The first two-thirds of the film are standard police fare, but the finale goes much bigger. Unfortunately, the budget just was not there to make it look effective, but the cast, who seemed to be loving it, made the men-and-machinery action more than palatable. The excitement mainly comes from stunts and shoot-outs, and Lau showed he could hold his own in these epic sequences featuring planes and big bits of metal, humanising the action with his charismatic presence. Final Justice (1997) Derek Chiu Sung-kee was known for directing clever, original works in the 1990s, and this courtroom film is a bold attempt to do something different. Produced by Johnnie To, Final Justice is an action-free drama that deals with the problem of squaring religious beliefs with the actualities of real life. Lau plays Father Li, a naive Catholic priest who struggles with celibacy. When the sexually active Donna (Almen Wong Pui-ha) tells him about her miserable romantic encounters at confession, he innocently says he will counsel her. She ends up seducing him at his flat. When he refuses to leave the priesthood and marry her, she accuses him of rape – probably out of spite, although her motives are not made clear. The second half of the film is a courtroom drama featuring Carman Lee as a ruthless lawyer who represents the priest. The nub of the story is that Father Li will not reveal what he heard from Donna in confession to his lawyer – information that she feels will help his case. Lau is effective as a naive clergyman who is shocked that his flock will not forgive him for the lapse of sleeping with a woman – even though they do not believe he committed sexual assault. Although he brings credibility to his role, Lau was disappointed he could not dig deeper into his character. “When you are shooting a movie in Hong Kong, there is no time available, so you don’t really get a chance to think about what you are doing,” he told this writer. “I had to try and work out how a guy could give up everything to serve God. I asked some priests this question, but I didn’t really find out the answer.” In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook.

Lau Ching-wan’s best mid-1990s Hong Kong films, from Loving You to Big Bullet

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Several of Lau’s mid-1990s roles strongly hinted at the greatness to come for the four-time best actor winner

Loving You (1995)

Several of Lau’s mid-1990s roles strongly hinted at the greatness to come for the four-time best actor winner