User Reviews

Released in 1984, "Long Arm of the Law" has a layer of historical context that may be unfamiliar for nowadays audience outside China.

The movie is exactly set in time: around Christmas of 1983 and New Year eve of 1984.

In the very beginning the police file of Big Tung (or Brother Tung, called so by his buddies and partners from HK underworld) is displayed.

Aged 32 at the time, Tung was one of the Red Guard leaders in Canton back in the Cultural Revolution, moved to Hong Kong in 1979, since then was suspected of several crimes. Obviously, other gang members were in the ranks of Red Guards too. As I think, they inherited their merciless and cruel attitude to others from there.

On the opposing side, there is superintendent Lee, looking between 40 and 50. In the sixties he surely was on service and stood against leftists who terrorized Hong Kong in 1967. For him, the "O Gang" came from that time. In the eyes of this police official, chasing the gang was not investigation but warfare, and finally it turned so.

LONG ARM OF THE LAW is an extremely gritty and low budget heist thriller from Hong Kong. The story follows a gang of six robbers who arrive in Kowloon from the Chinese mainland planning to rob a jewellery store. We follow their misadventures as they tangle with a local thug and informer before finally staging the heist, but their trouble doesn't end there. This is a tough, low rent film that benefits from a high dose of realism in both the characters and the locations. It features bursts of stark, bloody violence and a memorable climax in which the characters find themselves hemmed in by police inside a walled city. The action is so well directed that I feel it directly influenced John Woo's style of filmmaking, with great, explosive choreography and even a Mexican standoff at one point. A key production in the development of the Hong Kong action film.

Long Arm of the Law (1984) by producer/writer Johnny Mak (his only film as a director) is considered as the first of the Heroic Bloodshed films, "officially" being born with A Better Tomorrow, by John Woo. Long Arm of the Law is written by former police officer Philip Chan, who has made many other films, too, for example CAT3 rated thriller Night Caller. Director Johnny Mak wanted to use amateur actors in Long Arm, and that is very wise choice as the film is now very realistic and almost documentary like.

*next pharagraph includes minor spoilers!*

The film tells the story of so called Big Circle gang, which lives in mainland China but plans to visit Hong Kong in order to rob a jewellery store there and then come back to mainland as rich men. The gang includes a leader, a calm Tung, and some other men, and they are very loyal to each other. The things start to go horribly wrong as one of them is killed soon, and the jewellery store has already been robbed by another gang, so the area is filled with police officers. What follows is a delay of the robbery and happenings that only make things more difficult and hopeless for our protagonists..

*no more spoilers..*

Long Arm of the Law is simply among the greatest Hong Kong action dramas I've ever seen. There's no stupid slapstick humor or funny moments, this is real and gritty slice of urban life with all its hopelessness and poverty, both emotional and monetary. The theme is very close to so called Heroic Bloodshed films created ultimately and with great commercial success by master John Woo with his beautiful films like A Better Tomorrow 1-2 and The Killer. Woo's films are always very beautiful and symbolic, and also in a way optimistic, and I really love his artistic and stunning cinema, too. But Long Arm is very different from Woo's films, because it is so bleak, gritty, dark and the violence is anything but beautiful or ballet like. And again, I'm not understating Woo's work, I'm just writing about the differences between Long Arm and his films, as they share the same great genre in Hong Kong cinema. Long Arm of the Law is pretty same in tone with Johnnie To's incredible masterpiece of mayhem cinema The Big Heat, which is also one of the greatest achievements in Orient cinema I've seen.

Long Arm of the Law and The Big Heat are brutal in any possible way, and their depiction of world we live in is ugly and merciless. The characters in Long Arm of the Law eventually turn against each other, and soon we witness the first legendary Heroic Bloodshed element as the characters point each others' heads with guns, a familiar element in John Woo's films. They were loyal to each other, but then due to the crisis they were thrown into, their relations suffered and all the dreams and goals were destructed and crushed. The police is depicted pretty ugly in this film as they shoot at innocent people in order to get the criminals, and they shoot at criminals, too, without trying to solve things with talking. Since this film is written by Phillip Chan, a former police officer, we can only hope this is NOT based on his experiences in the force. If it is based, then this film becomes even more important and should be seen by every leader and police chief in every country in the world as a warning.

Long Arm of the Law is brilliantly shot and is as fantastic as action films can be. The action scenes and scenes of shoot outs are so great that one can only hope this could be seen in the big screen. The last scene that lasts about 15 minutes in the famous Walled City in Hong Kong slum is incredible and among the greatest, most claustrophobic and insane gun fight scenes I've ever seen in any film. Also the other scenes are more than fantastic, and the violence is also very brutal and realistic. The bullets hit people without remorse, and the results are as in real life: blood, pain and eventually the death. The scene at the skating rink is as memorably mean as the motorway death scene in The Big Heat. After all the mayhem has finished and the end credits roll, there is a feel of total pessimism and despair, and the viewer should be nailed to the seat and stopped to think about the state and values of the world the film is set.

There are few little flaws in this film, and without them, I would've given this a full 10 stars rating. There are some things not explained about the robbery. For instance, didn't they really have to wear any masks or bullet-proof vests of any kind in the first place? Also, the scene in which bullets are taken off of character's body, it all seems to happen a little too easily and without the victim feeling anything. There are some other similar minor stupidities and little mistakes in this film, but they are easy to forgive as the film as a whole is so great.

Long Arm of the Law deserves 9/10 rating, and is among the finest examples of Hong Kong cinema, which is totally unique compared to Western cinema.

Directed by Johnny Mak Tong-hung, this is the first of four movies in this series.

Nobody is heroic in this, as Tung (Wai Lam), Chubby (Wong Kin), Chung (Lung Chiang), Blockhead (Fong Li), Bullseye (Lam Seung-Sam) and Rooster (Chan Ging) leave China for Hong Kong and pull off a jewel heist. When they get there, they run into numerous issues and need to make money while waiting for the right moment to strike. That means they end up killing someone and it ends up being a cop, a crime that gets them double crossed by the man who paid for it, Tai (Wai Shum).

The end of this film is incredible, a doomed pursuit as the police chase the gang down by any means necessary. Even though we've seen all of the criminals be horrible people, we start to feel for them because there's no way they're going to get out alive.