Could be considered Hong Kong's answer to Ron Howard's BACKDRAFT in many ways. Johnnie To, who has never failed to amaze me to this very day, does a wonderful job once again directing the story and handles relationships between the main actors; featuring Sean Lau, Alex Fong, Carman Lee, Ruby Wong and Raymond Wong, and their values of being on duty as fire fighters very well and because of that, you get quite an amount of humanity and morality within this profession in the character development which was something I appreciated very much.

Aside the drama, there's of course also great numbers of well choreographed action scenes which was done by Yuen Bun, doing a usual great job like in many other movies made by Johnnie To: consisting of fire-fights, team-work, explosions and rescues of various kinds like saving people from crushed cars/broken elevators and rooms with jammed doors etc. Overall I found LIFELINE to be a good movie (save for some parts here and there which almost made me fall asleep) and also well done for a pre-Milkyway movie (Johnnie To was still developing his style which came to be evident in these earlier films), in fact it's one of the better pre-ones of his.