Last Updated on April 19, 2021 by rob
Courageous but hot-tempered officer Bill Chu (Lau Ching-wan) finds himself demoted after assaulting a superior officer responsible for a raid gone disastrously wrong. After being reassigned as a patrol officer with the Emergency Unit Bill’s old boss is killed in a restaurant shootout and Bill’s determination to catch the men responsible drags his inexperienced EU comrades into a full on shoot out with the gang when they snatch $9 million from Interpol headquarters and hatch a plan to smuggle the haul out of the country on a British military transport plane.
If Fox Hunter was a naff title for a way above average genre entry then Big Bullet deserves some sort of award for sheer laziness. I mean, how long did they spend thinking that one up? Or maybe there’s some sort of secret formula at work here. As in the better the movie the lamer the title. Come to think of it that must be it since Big Bullet is a gem of 90’s Hong Kong action cinema. I knew I was going to like it when the first person to show up onscreen as a brave cop named Bill Chu who doesn’t suffer fools gladly was Milky Way regular Lau Ching-wan. And then when Francis Ng turned up as Lau’s boss I thought ‘Alright! Now all we need is a great villain’ and lo and behold there was the great Anthony Wong playing a long-haired, ruthless and seemingly perpetually self-amused killer named Bird whose own survival depends upon him retrieving nine million dollars from the security of an Interpol bank vault that he’d failed to steal previously.
For this he needs the help of an ex-cop turned banking executive, or more precisely said ex-cop’s hand, a brutal sequence which culminates in an absolutely barnstorming shootout on the streets of Hong Kong that for sheer visceral intensity rivals the urban shootout in Heat or pretty much any other movie you can think of. It’s a great first act action setpiece but the film is up and running right from the off as Lau’s cop, Sergeant Bill Chu, is demoted to street patrol after punching out a slimy superior officer. Lau, an actor who specializes in offbeat characters is here cast as more of a straight arrow action hero but he still manages to find quirks in the character, delivers superbly and gives his supercop a nice line in self-deprecating humour.
The script by Benny Chan, Susan Chan and Joe Ma (the latter of whom co-wrote the terrific A War Named Desire) gives us peeks into the private lives of Chu’s new team during their downtime in scenes both comic and touching as well as his friction with a by-the-book cop played by Jordan Chan, who has his own problems with a brother who used to be in the force but has since left and turned criminal. The resolution of this sub-plot which is virtually the last scene of the film is a lovely heartwarming moment. The plot twist it reveals may seem obvious in retrospect but at the time it took me completely by surprise. And Theresa Lee as the patrol’s sole female member and computer expert (‘I’ve just deleted my overseas call charges!’ she winningly tells Bill after hacking Interpol’s computers) is a delight.
By the time Wong and his men make their move the combination of humour and character development has made its mark; the camaraderie between them is rock solid, we really like these people, don’t want to see them hurt and that elevates the movie significantly. The climax – an exciting nocturnal fight both inside and on top of a British military cargo plane as it trundles down a runway – is a skillful combination of action and humour. Big Bullet works on every single level. It doesn’t break any new ground but it is so confidently done that it makes all the usual cliches of the genre seem fresh again.
