Prison Flicks

Rating: (1.5 out of 5)

Starring: Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, Sammo Hung, Tony Leung, Jimmy Wang-Ko, Chun Hsiung, and Tao Chung Hwa.

Directed by Chu Yen Ping.

Cult movie afficionados often like to point out how heavily Hollywood plagerizes from Asian sources. However, this tendency goes both ways. Jackie Chan is the Prisoner, better known as Island of Fire, is a good example of this cross fertilization. This movie borrows heavily from American sources, most notably the classic Cool Hand Luke. This borrowing is frankly bizarre. It does not move the plot forward in any particular way. Indeed, outside of a spoof, I don’t think I have ever seen a movie recreate scenes from another movie in quite such a gratuitious manner. What is odd is that these literal quotations rather detract from the plot, which is a serious concern in a movie that seems to lose its way for most of the running time. But, as is often the case, I am getting ahead of myself.

Although this movie seems to be marketed in the United States as a Jackie Chan vehicle, it really isn’t. Chan has a small role and he’s never really allowed to strut his stuff. Indeed, I’d be hard pressed to say who is the main character, since the lead actually seems to shift with the numerous plot gyrations throughout. Initially, the movie seems like a straight-forward “good cop undercover behind bars” story. We’ve all seen this theme a million time… heck, even “Charlie’s Angels” used that old chestnut. In this case, the good cop is “Andy” played by Tony Leung. I put “Andy” in quotes, because that is the dubbed name, rather than the character’s name in the original Cantonese. I mention this because I gather that the dubbing is a little sloppy and that at least part of the plot is lost by virtual of simplistic or incompetent dubbing… although, frankly, given the action on-screen it is hard to imagine that there are many layers of subtlety hidden away in the original dialogue. Anyway… back to Andy. He’s a cop. He’s dating the a police inspector’s daughter. After dinner at dad’s, Andy and the girl retreat to his car where he tries to… not to put too fine a point on it… get into her pants. She refuses, saying she’s tired of fooling around in the back seat of cars. Anyway, this little bit of time wasting is actually to explain why they are still sitting in front of the house when a mysterious stranger walks up and rings the doorbell. The inspector opens the door and finds himself face-to-face with an assassin who promptly fills him full of lead. Daughter screams. Andy hops out of the car and fires a couple of shots at the assailant, who nonetheless manages to flee into his waiting car… which proceeds to explode as he tries to drive away, which leaves nothing of the assassin to identify. Luckily, one of Andy’s shots actually blew the assassin’s thumb off, so they are able to use that to get prints. They get a perfect match, but OMG, it turns out the prints match a dead man, a convict executed for assaulting a prison guard.

I am not sure Andy is a very good cop because instead of even trying to investigate this case, he seems to immediately decide that the only way to figure out what is going on is to go behind bars himself. So he gets into a barroom fight, beats the crap out of some thugs, and draws a two year sentence. I believe the movie is set in Taiwan, although some online sources seem to assume Hong Kong, but either way, where this movie is set seems to have only one prison and one cellblock, because everyone conveniently ends up in the same lockup regardless of whether the crime is murder, assault, or robbery. Anyway, once in prison, either Andy completely forgets about his mission, or he is extremely patient. He basically does not do anything police-related. He does befriend his geeky cellmate Charlie (Chung Hua Tou) and he does make some enemies among the lifers. But seriously, this whole undercover cop investigating the mystery of the executed assassin goes in abeyance for the next hour of running time. Andy does manage to get himself beaten up by the prison kickboxing champion. Supposedly all the new inmates have to take on the champion their first night in stir, although if I remember correctly, only Andy seems to go through this in the movie. Whatever. Oh, and Charlie has a pet mouse. Guess what happens to squeaky?

We pass the time by meeting a slew of other characters. We have “John” (Sammo Hung), a genial goof of a prisoner whose sole preoccupation is escaping occassionally in order to spend a day on the outside with his young son who thinks he is a spy rather than a convict. I have a young son myself, and well, I found this subplot touching. But touching or not, it has nothing to do with anything else and ultimately feels like a waste of time. And just for the record, I don’t say it is a waste of time because I dislike character development scenes, but rather because in the final analysis the character development is not relevant to the plot. At the end of the movie, John does not act any differently because of his son… but again, I am getting ahead of myself.

Another prisoner arrives shortly, “Steve” (Jackie Chan). Steve is, I guess, a pool hustler… or maybe a pool champion. Anyway, “Boss Lee” (Andy Lau) sends his goons to order Steve to throw a match. But Steve is too proud and wins anyway. This results in a scuffle, which Steve survives fine, but in which his girlfriend is grievously wounded. Now, Steve has 24 hours to raise the money to pay for her operation. He finds an all-night card game, and miraculously wins enough to get her a liver transplant. Unfortunately, his playing partners don’t want him to walk away after winning big. They want a chance to win their money back. Steve refuses. A fight ensues. Jackie Chan does some of his tradenmark stunts, but it is all a bit desultory. Just as Steve is about to get away clean, he runs into Boss Lee’s brother. They fight, and the brother ends up dead, and Steve gets packed off to prison for manslaughter.

Another character we meet is “Lucas” (Yu Wang). Lucas is, I guess, the boss of the cellblock. He returns from solitary to the widespread cheers of the other inmates. They carry him around on their shoulders and so on. When Boss Lee tries to put a contract out on Steve, Lucas refuses to allow a contract murder to occur in his cellblock, although the version of the movie I saw does not explain why. When Lee’s hired goons put aside their orders due to Lucas’ intervention Lee himself gets himself thrown into prison for beating up a cop so he can do the job himself. Again, conveniently, he ends up in the same cell block.

Having introduced the main characters, the movie then takes a strange turn. Instead of developing a plot that brings these characters together in some sort of coherent narrative, the movie instead devotes much of the next 30 minutes to aping scenes from Cool Hand Luke. Now, I don’t mind even liberal “quoting” from other films, and indeed, in several of my reviews I’ve been positive about homages that essentially acknowledge the importance of other movies in the genre. Actually, I don’t even mind remakes as a general rule. But there is something about the mindless lifting of scenes here that rubs me the wrong way. Island of Fire does provide a twist on one scene from Luke. When Lucas is ordered to eat an entire tub of rice by a brutal guard, it turns into a solidarity moment for the inmates as they help him out instead of a stunt like the eggs in CHL. But, on the other hand, there are scenes and images that are lifted straight and out of context. We have the sharpshooting guard armed with a sniper rifle and mirrored sunglasses. We get a scene where the inmates rush to finish paving a road before the deadline set by the head boss. We get a scene where a beautiful woman gets all wet and rubs her boobs against a car window. We get a scene that mimics Luke’s last escape complete with the same decoy ploy and same stolen keys trick. Quite literally a quarter or more of the film’s running time is wasted on these scenes, and they do nothing to advance the plot, which if you will recall ought to be focused on how a man executed in prison might turn out to be an assassin on the outside. Indeed, these scenes don’t even advance the other plot lines — such as Steve against Boss Lee or the competition for leadership of the cellblock. Now, in fairness, this flaw is exacerbated by an American release that cuts 30 minutes or so off the original running time. I guess the American distributor decided to leave these scenes in to appeal to an American audience… although I doubt your average Blockwood customer would recognize the quotations even if they had seen CHL at some point. But fairness aside, I have always made it a point to review what I see on the screen, not what appeared in some other version, or in the book, or in the director’s commentary. And what appears on the screen is pretty incoherent.

The main problem with this movie is that it confuses set-up and payoff. What happens during most of the running time is that the main characters get executed one by one for escaping or attacking guards or starting riots. John, Steve, Andy, and Boss Lee all meet this fate. (Not Lucas, he just gets killed by the sharp- shooting guard.) As it turn out, the executed prisoners are not really executed, but instead are given a second chance — if they will work for the corrupt warden, he’ll let them live. Of course, since they are listed as already dead in the books, they don’t really have any choice but to go along. Right, this is the the La Femme Nikita plot twist. But while Nikita actually explores some of the implications of this concept, Island of Fire just uses it as a setup for a cheeseball shoot-em-up on an airport runway… a shoot-em-up that leaves everyone but Andy dead. Andy returns home to confront the warden who, it turns out, is using the inmates to cover his corruption under the guise of running a vigilant squad. Or something.

Here is my problem with all of this: There are actually several interesting movies mashed together here. First of all, we have the potential for a gritty prison drama, focused on the brutality of the prison and the way it abuses and then discards its inmates. Second, we could have a solid movie that actually focused on any one of the myriad plot points — John and his kid, Lucas and running the cell block, Andy and his investigate, Steve vs. Boss Lee — but all of these are given short-shrift by being forced to compete with the others. Third, you could have an interesting, kick-ass, Hong Kong version of La Femme Nikita. But we get none of these. We get bits and pieces, plus extended homages to Cool Hand Luke that just don’t add up to anything interesting. In short, this movie is pretty weak. Really for Asian action movie completists only.