Things changed. I can't tell whether I just grew jaded, or I simply had a harder time finding great HK films. The action genre went into eclipse in HK as a cycle of comedy and drama moved back in. Action movies will always be a staple for any movie market, but the films I saw were getting more and more low budget and derivative. Also, I was trying to see as many "chicks who kick butt" films as I could. The older classics were hard to find and rent and the new movies, usually HK/Phillipines (where the genre was still popular) hybrids, were really a step down in quality. As 1997 approached, many of the great HK directors left for other countries and the triads took over the film industry. And, arguably, the movies themselves, built on rickety energetic intermeshings of cliche and originality, melodrama and slapstick, were finding only so many ways to braid and rebraid these worn threads. There was the feel of some great animal finally losing its will.
And but so, where I might have seen five or six great HK movies in a six month period in previous years, there have been maybe four this last year and a half (The Blade, Magic Cop, Righting Wrongs, Ashes of Time). Arguably,the best of them by far is Righting Wrongs.
Righting Wrongs is about a lawyer (Yuen Baio), trained in America (or maybe Australia), who comes back to HK and finds himself a prosecutor frustrated by the law. The criminal bosses he tries to persecute manage to use the law to get off the hook. He mentions his frustration to a judge, who suggests that he take the law into his own hands. It's a great scene as the judge, under the pretext of gently kidding, tells Yuen Baio that he, the Judge, would let Yuen off the hook if caught.
So Yuen Baio goes out and bumps off some criminals and gets for his trouble a hard-ass cop (Cynthia Rothrock, yaay!) on his case. (The introductory scene of Rothrock, where she beats up a restaurant full of guys makes getting a copy of this movie worth it at any cost). Additionally, there is a seemingly unstoppable assassin behind the scenes knocking off people who turns out to be-- a crooked cop (Cynthia's supervisor, in fact).
People talk about how John Woo's work is operatic, but here in Righting Wrongs is an action movie that most closely resembles (western) opera. Crooked cop, unethical lawyer, ethical cop all form corners of a violent triangle that revolves around the conflict between law and justice. And it does so both more entertainingly and thoughtfully than most American movies that I've seen on the subject.
Although Cynthia's fights wax and wane in quality (Yes, Madam! has the better use of her fighting talents overall), although the comedic element in the movie is lame and predictable, although Yuen Baio's ability to be convincingly expressive sort of comes and goes, Righting Wrongs goes on to push itself deeper and deeper into its material, resembling at the end more of a Jacobean revenge tragedy than a traditional HK flick.
The golden age of HK films may have come and gone, as far as I can tell (of course, there are those that think that the golden age was back when all the stars were women and all the movies were Cantonese costume operas), but it's a comfort- - cold though it may be- - that there are some great movies that came about as a result. Try this one out, you'll get more than you planned for.