From director Taylor Wong (Buddha’s Palm, Behind the Yellow Line) comes a crime epic duology inspired by the likes of Coppola’s Godfather and Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. In Rich and Famous (1987) we meet close friends Yung (Alex Man) and Kwok (Andy Lau) who have run up a gambling debt they could never dream of paying off, but the charismatic gangster Lee Ah-Chai (Chow Yun-Fat) bails them out on the condition that they work for him. But it’s not too long till Yung and Kwok rise through the ranks, and Yung has eyes on the top spot. Tragic Hero (1987) picks up the ongoing war between Yung and Lee, as their aggression towards each other reaches new heights of revenge and vengeance. This path of violence has its end in sight, and one of these former friends isn’t going to make it out alive.

I love a good Hong Kong crime film, give me any of the John Woo greats like A Better Tomorrow or Hard Boiled or Lau and Mak’s Infernal Affairs trilogy and I’ll be having a great time. Wong’s duology are so close to being good Hong Kong crime films, the DNA of what made their contemporaries so timeless is somewhere deep in these films but it never quite gets the chance to come fully out and embrace the sincere angsty ridiculousness of a Woo film. There is nothing wrong with making something that is more paired back and quieter either, but there’s a limit you can reach before your film becomes completely uninteresting. Rich and Famous and Tragic Hero are, sadly, just really boring. They hit all the right beats these stories should do but with minimal flare or excitement, leaving you with roughly three hours of dry Triad drama. Stephen Siu and Manfred Wong’s script is the biggest weakness of the film, the script just isn’t very interesting. Much so to the point that I can’t even distinctly say what was bad or good about it, it is about as standard a mob script as you can get, hitting all the narrative beats you may come to expect from this genre of crime film. There’s some naïve young guys who are drawn into a life of crime by a suave leader and one of the youngsters begins to question the leadership of his gang and wants to stake his own claim to be the leader. You’ve seen this story before, and you’ve probably seen it better.

The problem is never Taylor Wong’s visual direction, which is sharp and slick with just the right amounts of stylistic exaggeration where appropriate. Wong actually uses slow-motion quite well at many points across the duology, often suitably raising the emotional stakes the scenes have. There’s a great moment in Tragic Hero where Lee is leaving a nightclub after a vicious disagreement following the events of the previous film’s harrowing ending, and the slow-motion shot of him walking out with his lackeys trying to calm him down perfectly sells this sense of being so drawn out of your own world and being singularly consumed by this hatred. It’s little moments like this that show that Wong has the pedigree to create something visually sumptuous, and it’s not like he can’t sell the more over the top moments of the story either. The final firefight that takes up Tragic Hero’s final act is precise and measured in terms of pacing and choreography, often making great use of the tiny environment as well the lighting created by the raging fires engulfing the house Lee has taken refuge in. Very similar stuff can be said about the ending of Rich and Famous, and while I won’t spoil the exact events here I will say that the way Wong shows the extreme violence of the scene definitely places the emotional fallout at the very centre of the sequence.   

Chow Yun-Fat is the clear star of the show here, perfectly bringing a suave and quietly violent energy to his role as mob boss Lee Ah-Chai. From the moment he steps into frame you so clearly get this sense of his power and presence, and Wong makes the wise choice of focusing Tragic Hero’s narrative around Lee. Yun-Fat’s best chemistry comes when he’s confronting the manic excess of Yung as played by Alex Man. Man is a deeply sinister performer when he needs to be, and the performance he gives when Yung has become this mob leader is really quite frightening at points as he plays violence with a grin and clearly loves mowing down his fellow man. A real highlight of Man’s performance is when he shoots his own henchman at point blank while just sitting down in a garden chair smoking a cigar, the way he laughs with childish glee is wonderfully camp.

The bonus features of this double disc set are a bit of a mixed bag. Aside from the usual selection of trailers, we get a wide variety of audio options including English dubs and newly mastered versions of the original Cantonese mono audio tracks. The disc for Rich and Famous contains a genuinely interesting, albeit short, documentary on the history and process of dubbing world cinema with interviews from industry veterans ranging from actors to sound engineers. If you ever needed a primer on a section of the film industry that often goes under looked then this is a great starting point.  Tragic Hero, by comparison, is less interesting with a pair of archive interviews from writer Manfred Wong and one with Michael Mak. A selection of varied quality for sure, but the dubbing documentary is well worth your time.

This duology of Triad dramas is a perfectly serviceable introduction into the realm of Hog Kong action films, but it never feels more than serviceable or adequate. It’s well-directed and performed, but it’s just missing something in those scripts that fails to bring it fully together. Tragic Hero is marginally the better of the pair, with tighter pacing and a more compelling lead character to push the story forward. Not to say that Rich and Famous isn’t compelling at points, but it really drags after its energetic first act peters out and the mob-focused story kicks in. I was expecting a lot more from these than I got, but I’m sure die-hard collectors of rare Hong Kong thrillers will be happy to see these films get a set which restores them to the quality Eureka have.