10 great Hong Kong action films of the 1980s

The 1980s was a time of turbulence in Hong Kong cinema. Where wuxia movies ruled the late 1960s and kung fu swept the globe in the early 1970s, the end of the decade saw the rise of the Hong Kong New Wave. A young generation of filmmakers, most of whom studied cinema abroad and honed their craft in television, brought a fresh perspective and energy to the screen. The New Wave directors expressed the hopes, fears and lived experiences of Hong Kongers, rather than making films envisioning a long-vanished Imperial Chinese past.

Genre cinema was hardly immune to the influence of the New Wave. The kung fu comedies that ruled the box office in the late 1970s fell out of favour as upstart companies like Karl Maka’s Cinema City created a contemporary popular cinema. Action directors had to move with the times. Sammo Hung made his last kung fu film The Prodigal Son in 1981, while Jackie Chan signed off with Dragon Lord (1982). 

The emerging action cinema was assertively modern in style and subject, with filmmakers addressing the growing uncertainty felt by Hong Kongers as the British government began discussions with the Chinese Communist leadership about the handover of the territory in 1997. 

Directors such as Ringo Lam and Johnny Mak tapped into this growing disquiet about the future. From Long Arm of the Law (1984) to City on Fire (1987), Hong Kong movies addressed questions of identity and self-determination even as their action choreographers relentlessly pushed the limits of stunt work and fight choreography.

Director: Jackie Chan

After topping the box office with his kung fu comedies Fearless Hyena and The Young Master, in 1982 Jackie Chan’s over-budget Dragon Lord was soundly thrashed by Aces Go Places, a contemporary comedy from Karl Maka’s Cinema City that made Chan’s style look old fashioned. In response, Chan dragged his action cinema into the 20th century for a rip-roaring adventure about the Hong Kong coastguard battling pirates in the South China Sea. 

Project A was the first in a run of hits to capitalise on the chemistry between Chan and his former China Drama Academy classmates Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung. The action ditches kung fu in favour of death-defying stunts inspired by silent film stars Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and a fresh, freewheeling approach to the fight scenes combining acrobatics, martial arts and a barroom brawl. The result is arguably the most relentlessly entertaining film of Chan’s career.

Director: Sammo Hung

In the 1980s, Sammo Hung seemed unstoppable. He blended horror, comedy and kung fu in Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), and Winners and Sinners (1983) established a winning formula of using an ensemble cast of local comedy stars paired with an attractive leading lady, mixing gags with Hung’s trademark, full-contact style of action. 

Wheels on Meals took the comedy-action formula on the road to Barcelona, with Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao leading the cast and former Miss Spain Lola Forner providing the requisite glamour and international appeal. Hung’s masterstroke was casting American kickboxing champion Benny Urquidez as the opponent for Chan’s hero in the grand finale. Their onscreen battle was unprecedented for its speed, energy and sheer bruising intensity, throwing down a gauntlet for every other action star and director to match. Forty years on, the Chan-Urquidez dust-up remains one of the most exhilarating fight scenes ever staged.

Director: Johnny Mak

Prefiguring the blood-soaked gangland sagas of John Woo and the bleak nihilism of Ringo Lam, Johnny Mak’s only solo directorial outing Long Arm of the Law holds the distinction of being shot on location inside the notoriously dangerous Kowloon Walled City, a ramshackle illegal settlement controlled by the triads. 

The plot taps into anxieties about the 1997 handover, as former People’s Liberation Army soldier turned criminal Ho Yiu-tung (Lam Wai) plans to rob a Hong Kong jewellery shop with the aid of his old comrades from the PLA. For this bravura work of filmmaking, Mak shot on the streets without permits and smuggled cameras into China to shoot in Guangzhou. Aside from Lam Wai, most of the cast were not professional actors. The action scenes, choreographed by Sammo Hung’s stunt team, are chaotic, visceral and breathless, captured with a raw, documentary-like feel as the camera races to keep up with the participants.

Director: Jackie Chan

Deeply unhappy from his experience working with American director James Glickenhaus on The Protector (1985), Jackie Chan decided to make his own action thriller with Police Story. It’s obvious from the outset that Chan is determined to prove he can stage bigger, bolder stunts than any American team. The opening sequence boasts the complete destruction of a shanty town as cars tumble headlong down a hill, followed by the famous sight of Chan hanging off the side of a bus speeding through traffic using only an umbrella. 

By the time the credits roll, Chan has repeatedly smashed his face through glass panes, ridden a motorcycle through a shopping mall, and performed a death-defying slide down a live electrical wire. Throughout it all, Chan maintains his longstanding screen persona as an ordinary guy fighting against greed and corruption, while Maggie Cheung is the butt of the jokes as his long-suffering girlfriend.

Director: Tsui Hark

Tsui Hark’s career is marked by his talent for reinvigorating old characters and stories, from resurrecting the Cantonese folk hero Wong Fei-hung in Once upon a Time in China (1991) to remaking Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1967) as The Blade (1995). With Peking Opera Blues, Tsui brings the ‘nüxia’, the female knight errant of wuxia cinema, into the 20th century. 

Set during the turbulence of China’s early Republican period, the film follows three women, played by Brigitte Lin, Cherie Chung and Sally Yeh, fighting for the fate of their country and the right to determine their own futures. The film gleefully subverts gender roles, with Lin wearing a man’s military uniform, and Yeh as the daughter of a Peking Opera troupe owner determined to break her father’s taboo against women performing on stage. Even Chung’s money-hungry courtesan joins the revolution in Tsui’s big-hearted and cheerfully exciting adventure.

Directors: Teresa Woo with Kai-Ming Lai, Raymond Leung, Siu-Hung Leung

While the wuxia genre boasted swordswomen galore, come the 1980s, action heroines were thin on the ground. While Corey Yuen’s Yes, Madam (1985) portrayed Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock as modern-day warrior women, the bulk of the film concerned the antics of John Shum, Mang Hoi and Tsui Hark. By contrast, Teresa Woo’s Angel keeps the women in the spotlight. 

Saijo Hideki, Moon Lee and Elaine Lui are the private agents tracking the drug syndicate led by the deadly Yeung (Oshima Yukari). Hitherto, Moon Lee had been limited to playing pretty girlfriends, but Woo’s film remade her screen image from scratch. At the climax of Angel, Lee faces Oshima, a black belt in goju-ryu karate, in a knockdown, drag-out duel that remains startling for its unbridled ferocity. An action star was born; Lee became a fixture of female-led action cinema, regularly performing her own dangerous stunts and hard-hitting fight scenes.

Director: Ringo Lam

After starting his movie career directing comedies, Ringo Lam seized his chance when Cinema City founder Karl Maka offered him HK$4 million to make a film of his own choosing. The result was this stark, impressively bleak portrait of a reluctant undercover cop, Ko Chow (Chow Yun-fat), torn between competing loyalties to his mission, his fiancée (Carrie Ng) and his burgeoning friendship with career criminal Fu (Danny Lee). 

The script explores themes of identity, Hong Kong’s struggle for self-determination expressed in Ko Chow’s predicament, and, like Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law, fear of the uncertain future in the face of Hong Kong’s impending handover to China. Lam continued to mine this rich seam hereafter, creating his own cinema of pre-1997 anxiety with the equally excellent thriller Prison on Fire (1987) and School on Fire (1988), expanding on his themes of chaos, identity and the collapsing rule of law.

Director: Sammo Hung

Hung topped the box office in 1985, sticking to his successful comedy action formula in My Lucky Stars and Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars. Following another hit with Millionaires Express (1986), Hung switched gears for this Dirty Dozen-style tale about a squad of illegal immigrants who undertake a mission to destroy a weapons cache in post-war Vietnam in return for US citizenship. 

Hung’s status within the industry is evident in the all-star cast that features Yuen Biao, directors Yuen Woo-ping and Corey Yuen, and a squad of kung fu movie veterans including Hsiao Ho, Chin Ka-lok, Lam Ching-ying and Yuen Wah. Hung references motifs from Sam Peckinpah and The Deer Hunter, delivering a series of audacious action set-pieces that build towards a shockingly brutal showdown against the Vietnamese army where courage is no defense against a bullet. Eastern Condors may be Hung’s most downbeat film, but the action is breathtaking.

Director: Alfred Cheung

As a director, Alfred Cheung is best known for comedies like Let’s Make Laugh (1983) and Her Fatal Ways (1990), the latter satirising the cultural chasm between Hong Kong and the mainland. Cheung switches gears for On the Run, a lean, tough thriller that taps into the same anxiety as Ringo Lam’s On Fire series, portraying Hong Kong as a city running out of time, where violence is inevitable and inescapable. 

When police officer Heung Ming (Yuen Biao) uncovers corruption within the force, he becomes a target for the ruthless Superintendent Lui (Charlie Chin). Heung’s only hope for survival lies with a deadly hitwoman, Chui (Pat Ha). Cheung boldly casts against type: Yuen Biao plays an ordinary police officer, not an action hero, while Charlie Chin rose to fame as a romantic idol in Taiwanese cinema. Pat Ha steals the film, oozing cool as the lethal assassin who never misses.

Director: John Woo

John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) was the film that jumpstarted a wave of bloody gangland tales of honour, loyalty and revenge in Hong Kong cinema, but The Killer represents the apotheosis of the director’s balletic, extravagant style. Woo tips his hat to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Teruo Ishii’s An Outlaw (1964) with this tale of a hitman Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) who finds a kindred spirit in tough cop Li Ying (Danny Lee). The director fills the screen with slow motion shootouts accessorised with fountains of blood, flapping doves and exploding statues of the Virgin Mary. 

Unlike the nihilism of Ringo Lam or Alfred Cheung, Woo is a romantic, suggesting lessons learned from Chang Cheh, for whom Woo was an assistant director in the early 1970s. His noble gunslinging heroes live by unyielding codes of honour and perform grand acts of self-sacrifice to assert their unbreakable bonds of brotherhood.