Even by Ringo Lam's standards, this film is relentlessly grim and absolutely devoid of even the slightest glimmer of hope or happiness. In one way or another, all the characters shown here are deeply dysfunctional, their lives are marked by failure, despair and broken dreams, and they all come to a bad end.

Set in a triad-influenced high school somewhere near the old airport, the story is centered around two young girls played by Sarah Lee and Fennie Yuen, who get pulled into a world of drugs, crime and prostitution. Damian Lau plays their teacher who is unable to help them, and Roy Cheung is the menacing dailo who makes Fennie's life less than pleasant after she testifies against one of his gang members.

The girls encounter increasingly horrible things, and in their own way they both drift further and further into a vicious cycle of inhumanity and crime. Ringo Lam could have depicted this as tragic or melodramatic, but he opts for a far more realistic tone instead, giving each character flaws that prevent the audience from identifying too readily with any of them. Nevertheless, Fennie Yuen's performance in particular is quite harrowing and very effective in portraying the girl's helplessness in a painful way. It is almost a relief when her character finally lashes out in violent rage towards the end of the film (with deadly consequences).

More recent cinematic deconstructions of the triad mythology popularized first by the Heroic Bloodshed films of John Woo and then later by the Goo Wat Jai films, such as Jiang Hu:The Triad Zone, Beast Cops or Once upon a time in triad society 1/2 have generally opted for an ironic approach. This earlier Ringo Lam work, on the other hand, eschews irony and focuses an unblinking eye on the abject misery caused by triad violence and how this violence is tied directly to poverty and an economic model that marginalizes and disenfranchizes large segments of the population. Adding this level of social criticism comes at the price of comforting the audience through a happy end, but the end result is well worth watching - the movie, for all its bleakness, is quite gripping and engages the audience on several levels.

Recommended.