Flaming Brothers was not one of the major Hong Kong films that came over in the ‘90s. So it’s a new one to me I got to discover now that Eureka is releasing it on Blu-ray. As it fits into the heroic bloodshed category of the biggies, it’s great to watch another solid entry if not one of the game changers.
Chang (Chow Yun-fat) and Alan (Alan Tang) grew up together, then grew apart. Each fall in love and Chang wants to leave the triads, so you know it’s never a clean break. Flaming Brothers is straightforward but it’s still us or them when the guys with guns come after them.
There is some two fisting guns. One gunfight involves a forklift with a cool move. The final shootout in the stables gives them a lot of corners to hide behind for cover. If I lived in Hong Kong in the ’80s I could see movies like this every week but in the U.S. I had to wait for them and even now I’m catching up.
The Blu-ray looks great. Now we have 4Ks for the John Woo and Ringo Lam films to compare others to, but the print is clean and the 1987 locations come to vivid life. I’m a broken record about the leap from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray so that goes for Flaming Brothers too.
A 30-minute feature on the locations points out specific differences and what is the same in Macau, Hong Kong and Thailand settings of the film. An archival interview with director Joe Cheung goes for 45 minutes. He talks about working with Wong Kar-Wai on this script and spends the last 15 minutes on the state of the business. This must be early ‘00s because Nicholas Tse was the new star he references.
In their commentary, regulars Mike Leeder and Arne Venema give listeners a good explanation of Macau, which is near Hong Kong but a distinctly different place to set the movie.