The Adventurers arrives on Limited Edition Blu-Ray on April 29 from Eureka Entertainment. Pre-orders are now up and running at MVD Shop.
The late Ringo Lam remains one of the biggest core figures in Hong Kong cinema today. A notable figure among a roster of signaling Hong Kong’s “new wave,” Lam is best known for flourishing on the big screen with spells of modern crime dramas and thrillers, including his 1995 film, The Adventurers.
A lush rice field sets the stage for a prologue flashing back to 1975 as we witness the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in a helpless Cambodian village. The explosive backstory anchors the film’s introduction into the story of a much-older Wai Lok-yan (Andy Lau), a Thai Air Force pilot who lands the opportunity of a lifetime to avenge the murder of his family. His target? A CIA turncoat named Ray (Paul Chun) who made billions off of arms deals over the years and has ties with the Thai military.
Wai’s covert assassination attempt fails forcing him on the run with the help of Mona (Rosamund Kwan), mistress to the devious Lui who only treats her like property. What follows is a brief runaway tryst between Wai and Mona before Wai’s uncle, Seung (David Chiang) jettisons him off to the U.S., managing to collude with the CIA agents to help bring Lui down once and for all.
Here’s where the plot begins to thicken in Lam’s The Adventurers, a tale that crosses into international espionage and danger as Wai moonlights as a San Francisco crimeboss. There are machinations at play involving the use of Lui’s daughter, Crystal (Jacklyn Wu) to get close to Lui. The result is a cacophony of romance, mixed messages, and lovelorn violence that upend the once-perceived fantasy for Mona when Wai finds himself married to Crystal, albeit while in character.
High drama explodes with unfolding resolve with Wai ultimately forced to set boundaries after an incident leaves Crystal’s life hanging in the balance. Little does Wai know that his own life will soon be at stake, leaving to question whether or not getting closer than he ever has to ending his vengeful quest was worth the risks he took along the way, including the possibility of losing Crystal for good.
The Adventurers is another first in a series of firsts for me since I discovered Lam as a director amid his crossover with Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller Maximum Risk. I’d already heard of City On Fire, but by then, English-dubbed VHS tapes were still a thing and proper DVDs were out of reach. Simon Sez was garbage, but his next two turns with Van Damme on Replicant and prison thriller In Hell stood the test of time.
These titles all culminated one aspect of Lam’s memorable career which I’ll get into a little later, with The Adventurers serving as an inflection point for Lam and the Hong Kong film industry as a whole. The market may have been turning down at this juncture, but you can’t knock Lam for helping to breathing as much life back into it as possible, casting Lau and Kwan in roles that electrify on screen in several dimensions, as romantic interests and ultimate psychological opposites of one another as the story reveals later.
From the moment they find each other in Thailand to when he gets wounded trying to escape Lui’s men, to the moment the two make love in a steamroom while in hiding – all of this in the first half of the movie. Their affair compels you to think they might have some kind of a future together and lo and behold, Wai’s biggest twist unfolds and it throws you into even more troubled waters – a love triangle with entangling nuances and conflictions that grow our protagonist into something he never thought he would be: A man with something to live for.
Actress Wu holds up excellently as the flip-side of Lau’s on-screen romantic travails as Crystal. She’s the proverbial “daddy’s little girl” to an extent – as aware of her father’s criminal malfeasant and managing to leverage it when needed, much like Mona. Her character eventually delivers the essential heart the film needs as the relationships unravel in a moment of suspected infidelity for Wai, seeing the pure difference between Mona and Crystal – building blocks that he’s finally forced to acknowledge in just how compromised he is in his own growth to his own chagrin, as Lui connives with his own schemes in the backdrop.
The opening moments of the film delivers a suprising level of violence, including a stunt gag with a cleverly shot stunt sequence of someone getting run over by a humvee, followed by tons of gun fire and squib effects. It’s only as gratuitious as one views it depending on their filters, but it’s an ample addendum to the trauma of Lau’s character and its tragic backstory, fueling his need for vengeance against other interests he’s also forced to consider later in the film. This is where celebrated actor Paul Chun comes in clutch for the role of Lui, who takes a discernibly different look between both timelines of Wai’s childhood. Chun reunites with Lau here since appearing in several films together, including Lawrence Ah Mon’s Lee Rock films among others.
The cast also offers a few other noticable faces such as Big Trouble In Little China cohorts George Kee Cheung and the late Victor Wong, and a longer-haired Ron Yuan who you’d immediately recognize from films like Deadly Target or Drive. Interestingly though, Yuan’s supporting character speaks distinctive English compared to the film’s caucasian co-stars who are dubbed – something I can never really put my finger on as to why when it comes to Hong Kong productions, other than just reasoning that “this was a thing they did for their market appeal” and that was basically it. It’s a nitpick, I know, so it’s no big deal, and just an intricacy I think some would find fascinating.
I will add that this is one characteristic worth noting when watching the disc extras, namely Gary Bettinson’s extensive “Two Adventurers,” in which the Asian Cinema journal editor discusses Lam’s career and the film’s production, highlighting The Adventurers as Lam’s “Hollywood East” move. You also get an insightful look into the film and more from an archival interview with Sandy Shaw who wrote and also produced the pic. Other extras include an optional audio commentary by film critic David West, and a limited edition twenty-page booklet featuring photos and an essay about the film by Hong Kong cinema scholar Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park. Eureka’s release of The Adventurers is presented 1080p HD on Blu-ray from a brand new 2K restoration, with Cantonese mono and DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio options, and comes in a limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Time Tomorrow.
Not to be confused with Stephen Fung’s 2017 endeavor which also stars Fung and a cadre of big stars, the longstanding favor garnered by Lam at this juncture with The Adventurers speaks highly to the viability Hong Kong classics maintain to this day. It nearly thrills at every turn, with a cast and caliber of production that speaks to its ambit over the years, and a lead cast that makes every step of the adventure worth it.
