People's Hero (1987)
Reviewed by: Inner Strength on 2002-06-18
Summary: Excellent

[People’s Hero]

A film with Derek Yee behind it has got to be good, and People’s Hero is certainly no exception, with main performances by Ti Lung, both Tony Leungs, and produced by John Shum, there is little to go wrong.

The film is basically the HK version of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ which is about a bank robbery that goes wrong. Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) and Ronald Wong are two young men in desperation after their bank robbery plans go wrong. It would have been pulled off too if Ronald hadn’t had an epilepsy attack, drawing the attention to the two robbers before they had even started. The film goes on just as the original film it is based on (assuming you have seen that), with Ti Lung becoming the ‘man in the middle’ as such, who manages to get out of sight from the robbers and plans his own way of bringing the robbers to justice, but there is a lot more to him than first meets the eye, as the film soon takes another twist leaving the police unsure who is the real threat, the robbers or psycho, Ti Lung. Tony Leung (Ka Fai) and Paul Chun are the police detectives working on getting the hostages out safely.

As far as performances go, well, it took along time in his career to improve, but Ti Lung finally made it as a decent actor a few years before this, and this is one of his better films. Not his best mind, but not bad. I think Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) is the real star shiner in this, which is not surprising that this is the film that really launched his acting career. Leung Ka Fai not too far behind too, though his part was not nearly as big as it should have. Acting pretty good all round in fact, in perhaps one of the most underrated of HK films to ever be released.

The only flaw about the film, is the fact that it only lasts about 75 minutes (and I do have the full length version), and the story wasn’t stretched enough as the original film was, leaving so much time for other things that Derek Yee and John Shum must have just run out of ideas, as the film simply ends when it was just begging for something big to happen.

To conclude, this film is near masterpiece quality, and to me was always one of my favourite real films (let’s just forget about comedies for a minute now!), not far from classics like Bullet In The Head, A Better Tomorrow, etc. Although strictly speaking the film is copied from another American film, this was still pretty fresh for the HK film industry, which has never really released anything like it since.

A great action/thriller which I’m sure I will continue to come back to over and over again.

Highly recommended.

[4.5/5]