Flaming Brothers is a classic example of how good news and bad news often go hand-in-hand. The good news is that Flaming Brothers features some of the better gunfighting scenes to come out of Hong Kong during the late 1980's -- and considering how many "heroic bloodshed" films were being cranked out in HK during this time period, that is really saying a lot. The bad news is that Flaming Brothers also features some of Chow Yun-Fat's worst acting to date. In a career where he has mostly hit home runs, Chow's performance here is akin to a bunt that goes straight into the pitcher's glove. It's almost embarassing and threatens at many times to destroy the entire movie.

The film starts out with two friends growing up in an orphanage who early on see the gangster lifestyle as a a way out of poverty. Flash-forward about twenty years, and now the grown men (played by Chow and Alan Tang) have become successful Triads in Macau. However, after refusing to run drugs for the local dai lo (Patrick Tse), they are challenged to go to Thailand to do a dangerous arms deal to prove their worth to the "family".

So far this is pretty standard HK gangster stuff, but it's at this point that Flaming Brothers almost totally switches gears and threatens to lose the viewer in the process. Tang -- for reasons that are never explained -- goes to Thailand by himself to complete the deal, while Chow stays in Macau to romance a girl he had a crush on as a kid. It's these romantic scenes that really killed the buzz for me. Beforehand, we were treated to lots of gratuitous violence and a smattering of sex. But the middle portion of the movie has Chow over-acting as he hams it up, even going so far as to appear in women's makeup during a musical number which has absolutely no reason to be in this film. After seeing Flaming Brothers, I now know why screenwriter Wong Kar-Wai doesn't use scripts for his own films, because he really didn't seem to have a solid grip on creating a coherent story arc at this point in his career (some would say that this is a skill he still hasn't developed, but that's a matter for a different review).

Thankfully, things pick up near the end, when Tang and Chow team up to finally take down Tse. The finale displays the gunplay HK action movie fans love dearly -- stuff where guys don't just take one or two bullets before they go down, they take one or two dozen. The ending is also satisfyingly downbeat, especially compared with more modern films, where suagry-sweet endings seem to be the order of the day. For all that is good with Flaming Brothers, I just simply cannot forgive the movie's shortcomings in the middle half-hour. This portion almost feels Godfrey Ho-esque, like Chow's footage was taken from a different movie and spliced in. It's a shame, really, because Flaming Brothers isn't a bad film -- it just felt like it could have been so much better.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]