Director: Tony Chan
Year: 2020
Country: China
Alternate Titles: Lie huo ying xiong
Genre: Action
Plot:
After a disastrous incident, a firefighter is booted from the group after the deaths of several team-members in a blazing inferno under his watch. Finding solace in a secondary unit, he turns over command to a hotshot rookie who wishes he were still in the regular Army Corps than stuck fighting fires. When a fire breaks out at a coastal oil factory potentially endangering the city, Zhi finds himself and his unit thrust into the firing line to battle the blaze only for unforeseen circumstances and a series of lies from local officials about the severity of the fire to cause it to spread further than they imagined. Left with no alternative to defending the city, they're forced to rely on any means possible to stop it from engulfing the city.
Review:
At it's best, this one works as a straightforward action-filled disaster epic. There are numerous high-energy scenes depicting the groups at work battling the various fires and infernos around the city, all of which captured with explosive cinematography that puts the viewer in the heat of the moment. The opening, showcasing the team tackling a blaze in a small neighborhood shop, gets this going nicely with a series of great stunts and frenzied action leading into the fateful accident. That the main blaze starts around the half-hour mark and keeps a steady, unrelenting tempo throughout the rest of the film is a lot of fun, generating wide-scale disaster scenes of entire housing complexes and buildings being damaged by explosions or spreading fires. Focusing on ground-tactics with the fighters as well as aerial attacks and sea-based antics, this becomes quite exciting with these intense sequences.
Besides the thrilling action, what tends to hold the film up is its strong technical qualities. The fluid camerawork throughout the scenes of the blaze, taking the viewer up-close-and-personal with the crew as they struggle to implement their plans to keep the refinery in check and the fire from spreading is quite impressive. The heat can be felt from several instances as the flames are shown surrounding the firefighters inside the burning structures. This spectacle is handled nicely with the mounting action with the storyline twists involving keeping the city safe and the continuous lies from the facility security manager that escalates the drama about the out-of-control situation. Overall, these aspects provide the film with a lot of enjoyable elements.
There are some major drawbacks to the film. The biggest issue here is the unnecessary and considerable heroic jingoism on display that hammers home its theme of bravery and self-sacrifice to comic levels. The cliched notions featured throughout here, from the firefighter doing his job for the sake of his family to the experienced leader risking himself to put out the blaze and the cowardly rookie who finds the courage to do his job, are thick and heavy on civic pride here. Thus, there's no suspense to be derived from the potential outcome of each of these individuals as the solemn saluting and moments of silence that follow scream out their true intentions. On top of that, there are the storyline tropes about attempting to stop the fire without letting the severity reach the public in fear of panic or following useless subplots like the wife looking for her son, rendering the film to be overly-familiar and predictable. While this last issue isn't a true detriment it does undo some of the damage at its core.
Overview: ***/5
While it gets plenty of positive marks for the action and technical skill-set, the overwhelming jingoistic nature of the storyline and some useless subplots does bring the film down somewhat. Those wanting to go for the first qualities will be highly entertained by this one, while viewers turned off by the negative aspects will be less satisfied overall.
This review was originally published by Asian Movie Pulse and is gratefully reprinted with their cooperation.
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